


The Hills Are Alive

by MirasolAbeille



Category: Discworld - Terry Pratchett, The Sound of Music - Rodgers/Hammerstein/Lindsay & Crouse
Genre: F/M, Gen
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-09-23
Updated: 2018-07-02
Packaged: 2018-08-16 21:16:29
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 15
Words: 30,142
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8117851
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/MirasolAbeille/pseuds/MirasolAbeille
Summary: Captain von Trapp and his children get rather more than they bargained for with the new governess.





	1. The Interview

CHAPTER ONE: THE INTERVIEW

**

Captain Georg von Trapp stared at the new governess. 

She did not look like a nun. She most certainly did not look like a nun-in-training. If there was a picture next to the word ‘postulant’ in the dictionary, it was not hers.

“Are you sure,” he ventured finally, “that the Mother Superior sent you? Fräulein – ah” – he consulted the card she had handed him – “Sto Helit?”

“Susan will do,” said the new governess crisply, twitching at her immaculate cuffs. “And if by the Mother Superior you mean that kindly old woman who spends her days dispensing sugary tea and gratuitous advice from her office while Margarethe and Berthe run the place, then yes. She is acquainted with my grandfather. Professionally.”

“Oh,” said Georg. “Your grandfather, I see. And is he – clergy?”

The new governess considered this question. “He’s more of an interested third party,” she said after a moment. “It’s not that he’s against religion. He just thinks it shouldn’t be so organized.”

Georg opened his mouth, then closed it again. “Your letters of reference recommend you highly,” he said. “And you seem very qualified. May I inquire as to why you left your last place of employment?”

“Children grow up,” said Susan simply. “Gawain is enrolled in boarding school in Genua, and Twyla has been accepted for an apprenticeship with the Assassins’ Guild.”

“The Assassins’ Guild?” Georg repeated, incredulous. The new governess furrowed her pale perfect brow at him.

“It’s very difficult to get in, you know,” she said. “You can’t buy your way into that school; the placement exams are a literal nightmare and there’s no way to study for them. Twyla tested particularly well in Manipulation and Codswallop, with a strong showing in Attack Poker on the physical end of the assessment. She could be one of their greatest success stories, if she doesn’t decide she wants to be a ballerina instead.”

“I see,” said Georg, who didn’t. He frowned at her. Her voice and demeanor were textbook-perfect, he thought, and on the surface there was nothing wrong with her charcoal-colored linen dress, except that you could tell so emphatically that there was a female body inside it. But the eyes … and the _hair_ … and that bit about assassins … “Could you – turn around, please?”

Susan fixed the finger he was twirling with an even gaze until it wilted and dropped to his side. 

“Captain von Trapp, let me be perfectly frank with you,” she said. “The power differential in this relationship, if there is indeed to be a relationship, does not favor you. Word has gotten around that your children are a major discipline problem, and there is not a child-care professional within sixty miles that will consider this position. The old nun reached out to my grandfather out of necessity, and if I decide not to take on the challenge, you will be on your own. No more applicants are imminent.” She glanced at a neat little wristwatch. “Whereas I am interviewing three more families this very afternoon.”

“What do you mean, my children aren’t disciplined?” Georg said. “I am devoted to order within this household!”

Susan sighed.

“At least you have the good sense to offer combat pay,” she said. “And the location is really very lovely. I wish you good luck, Captain.”

She turned on her heel and picked up her valise. Georg felt his extremities go numb. It was a new sensation for him, only later identified as sheer and utter panic.

“Wait,” he said sharply, then modified his tone when she half-turned to raise one eyebrow at him. “I mean, _please._ Please wait.”

Susan set down the valise. The silver streak in her dark hair had come unplaited from its severe knot and curled itself, tentacle-like, against the plane of her cheekbone. He watched, mesmerized, as she produced a hairpin from one of the grey gown’s deep pockets and lifted her arms to secure it off her face. “I will require you to support my authority with the children,” she said, jamming in a second pin. “Consistency is the key to success.”

“I understand,” said Georg.

“I will take Tuesday as my afternoon off. And I shall require a room with a good view of the garden.”

“Agreed.”

“If a raven is seen in the area,” Susan said, “he is not to be pot-shotted at or poisoned. He is my – associate.”

“Your _associate_?” Georg blinked.

“Your word on it, Captain?”

“Oh. Ah. Right. Uh, certainly.”

Susan softened. “Well, then,” she said. “I suppose I should meet the children.”

**

“I’m Liesl!” shouted the oldest girl. “I’m sixteen years old, and I don’t need a governess!”

“Indeed,” said Susan, and narrowed her eyes. “I can think of a few things you do need. But you’ll never get them, taking that tone with strangers.” She regarded the defiant Liesl coolly. “Very well – it was too much to hope for that there wouldn’t be an adolescent power struggle somewhere in the mix. Back in line with you, miss, and whatever happens later, remember now that I told you you had it coming. Next.”

“I’m Friedrich! I’m fourteen, and I’m impossible!”

“I have seen impossible things every day of my life,” said Susan, “and every single one of them was more interesting than you. Whoever told you that had a very limited vocabulary; we shall have to work on expanding it. Next.”

“I’m Brigitta!”

Susan raised an eyebrow. “Louisa,” she said. “About thirteen, I should say. You’re not nearly as stealthy as you think you are.”

“I’m Brigitta,” said the smaller girl farther down the line. Susan identified her as the reader who'd been late to the lineup. “You’re very smart, and much younger than our usual governesses. You would be almost pretty if your hair weren’t so odd.”

“Brigitta, you shouldn’t say that,” said the chubby little boy next to her. The girl shrugged.

“Well, it is odd. Don’t you think so?”

“Fräulein Tilda didn’t even _have_ her own hair,” the boy reminded her. “Remember? She used to take it off at night and put it on her bed-table, and she left in fifteen minutes flat after the time Louisa pinched it and hid it in the chandelier.” He stepped forward. “I’m Kurt. I’m incorrigible.”

“Congratulations,” said Susan dryly.

"What's—incorrigible?”

“More limited vocabulary,” said Susan, “from a woman who probably hated children. Not that you gave her any reason to like you, I can see. What a sad little island of misfit toys you all are.” Ah, she thought, shifting her glance farther down the line, the little ones. More hope here. “And you are?”

“Marta,” said the little girl. She seemed more subdued than her restive older siblings, with great liquid eyes and dark braids. “I’m going to be seven on Tuesday. And I’d like a pink parasol.”

“Duly noted,” said Susan. This one would be no trouble. “And this brings us to … Gretl. Five, I see. Practically ready for a driving-license.”

“You need our advice if you’re going to succeed here,” said Louisa. The others nodded, their eyes gleaming avidly, and began to crowd out of their line into a clump around her. She felt something drop into her pocket and squirm against her thigh.

And so it begins, thought Susan.

“Don’t be ridiculous,” she said, cutting them off mid sentence. “All I need is a few moments to myself to unpack. And then we’ll do some assessments and see how far behind your peer group you’ve gotten, sequestered out here in the country with no real academic competition.” She eyed the whistle in her hand, set it down contemptuously on a French Regency side table, and snapped her fingers sharply behind her. The Von Trapp children goggled, wide-eyed, as the wooden trunk in the great hall lurched to its feet and began to trot toward them.

“Didn’t your father say you were to walk in the garden?” asked Susan. “Off you go then; I can find Frau Schmidt on my own, I daresay. And Kurt—“ she reached into her pocket again – “take this specimen with you, please. He is not a toad, but a freshwater frog, and he will be very unhappy if he is not returned to the lake. Amphibious skins are water-permeable and quite susceptible to dryness. Think how you would feel, if you were asked to live without oxygen for an hour.”

The children stared at her.

“Go,” said Susan. The tentacle of white hair had escaped its pins again and was waving around her face. It looked vaguely threatening.

They went.

**


	2. Dinner

CHAPTER TWO: DINNER

**

There was to be a dinner party that evening. _En famille_ , but still. 

There was always one, at the beginning of every new job. Susan supposed that her employer wanted to be certain she knew her fish knife from her demitasse spoon. At least, she thought, he did not seem to have read Twurp’s _Peerage_ ; she could be saved that one embarrassing conversation. Once they knew you outranked them, they could never quite look you in the eye again.

It was rather nice to dress for dinner, though if she had to do it often she would have to pop back and raid the closet she kept at Granddad’s. The old housekeeper had said something about a clothing allowance. If indeed that materialized ( _hur, hur,_ said Albert in the back of her head, _materialized, geddit?_ ), perhaps she would use it to acquire some less formal clothes for the children, suitable for nature study and physical education. Sailor suits, _honestly_ , and poor Friedrich about to turn fifteen; the therapy bills would be immense even if he weren’t still forced to show his knees to the world, and as it was … well. And had the Captain never heard of jersey knit?

Between the ironing and popping out seven children in eleven years, it was small wonder his wife was dead.

She swept down the staircase – it could be considered a perk of the job, that staircase – enjoying the rich swish of her silk taffeta. Aubergine, that was the color, a dull purple so dark it was black in the creases. A little less monochromatic than what she was accustomed to wearing, but that was what happened when you went shopping with Cheery and Violet after they’d been reading fashion circulars. 

Susan had to admit that the dark warm color flattered her skin. And it was pleasant to see the muscle tick next to Captain von Trapp’s thin, sardonic upper lip, as he glanced up from his before-dinner brandy and saw her crossing the foyer toward him. He might find her attractive, said that pulsing muscle, but he didn’t have to like it. Or admit it.

Oddly enough, this made her think better of him. 

"Good evening, Fräulein Susan,” he said, sketching the barest of bows. “I trust that you have settled in?”

“The room is quite adequate,” said Susan, dipping a curtsy that could better be classified as a nod. “I understand from Frau Schmidt that you are leaving in the morning?”

The Captain nodded. "I am going to Vienna,” he said, “for an extended social visit. Have you been?”

“Oh, yes.”

“You have traveled frequently?” At her nod, his mouth thinned. “By yourself, or as a term of your employment?”

“Both,” said Susan honestly.

“I find that surprising.”

“You are quite mistaken, then,” said Susan, “in your surprise. For I have been everywhere there is to go.”

He would no doubt have replied to this – those supercilious eyebrows all but disappeared into his widow’s peak – but the children surged into the room from wherever it was they had been lurking, and they went in to dinner instead.

**

The governess’ chair was at the foot of the table, opposite the Captain’s. Susan paused while spreading her skirts to sit, alerted by a muffled SQUEAK and a tiny flurry of activity as something was removed from her seat. 

So, thought Susan, they had not given up yet. How enterprising of them … or perhaps they were merely thicker than most of her former charges.

She sat, smoothed the napkin over her silken lap, and let a tiny triumphant smile blossom on her face, aware of seven baffled, half-disappointed glares being directed at her from under lowered lashes on the long sides of the table. From the floor between her feet came the sound of muted but enthusiastic gnawing.

“Will you offer grace, Fräulein?” said the oblivious Captain.

Susan wondered how he would react if she summoned Anoia. Certainly she felt like it at the moment.

“I should rather that we reflect this evening upon an improving thought,” she said, and was secretly pleased when he rolled his eyes over the top of his water glass.

“And that is—?”

“A man of my acquaintance once said that goodness is about what you do,” said Susan, “not who you pray to.” She surveyed the table calmly, letting just the barest tinge of the Look come over her. The younger Von Trapps recoiled from her one by one, finding their soup suddenly fascinating. “Who here,” she asked, “can say that they are truly … _good?_ ”

Silence settled over the table. It was broken by a covert sniffle. How odd it was, thought Susan, as a second child began to well up, but true of all human beings: tears and laughter were equally contagious.

She and the Captain faced each other across a sea of his weeping offspring.

“Fräulein Susan,” he said, cheek-muscle ticking like a clock. “Is it your intention to subject us all to emotional blackmail at every meal?”

"Confession is good for the soul, Captain,” said Susan, sipping her soup. It was leek and potato; unimaginative, but well-executed. She wondered if the cream was from local cows. “How fortunate your darlings are, then, to be given the opportunity to seek it.”

He glared at her.

**

They recovered in time for dessert. Children were reliable that way. And then, the telegram, and Liesl’s precipitate departure through the nearest door to the garden. Really, the other governesses must have been unimaginably stupid to have missed that.

“She’s down at the summerhouse,” said the raven, flapping through the open window of Susan’s bedroom and settling heavily onto one of the bedposts. “Going all moony over a stuck-up looking youngster in a poncy uniform. Got a nice singing voice, I’ll say that for him. But he’s going to send her crashing through one of them fancy glass walls, he don’t stop twirling her around like that.”

“Up to no good?” asked Susan. The raven thought for a moment.

“Unclear,” he croaked at last. “Seemed innocent enough. But I don’t trust the clean-cut ones.” He flapped a few times, rebalancing, then folded his feathers and leaned forward to inspect Susan’s vanity table. “Nice place they’ve got here,” he remarked. “Are those cashews?”

“Potpourri,” said Susan, hastily covering the dish. “I saved you half my roll from dinner, but it’s disappeared.”

SQUEAK.

"Honestly," said Susan. "Wasn’t the pine cone _enough?_ ”

SQUEAK.

“No matter,” said the raven. “Just tell me this: are they really little children? The kind that go sticky if you look at them sideways and then throw great big handfuls of their dinner on the terrace floor?”

“Too old for that,” said Susan. “But I’ll tell you what: stick close to the little one with the brown braids. She seems like the kind of child that feeds the nice widdle birdies.”

“Fair enough,” the raven said. “I’m off to the carriage house, then. There’s an old pigeon roost in the eaves. And it’s looking—“ he glanced out the open window – “like rain. Toodle-oo.”

“Stay out of the garbage!” Susan called after him, and was answered with a derisive _quork_.

"I should have brought Binky instead," she said to the Death of Rats. "At least he can be depended upon to be well-behaved." She pointed at the floor. “And don’t think I can’t see that you’ve left crumbs all over the carpet."

SQUEAK. 

There was some snuffling and nibbling. Susan patted on cold cream, belted herself more securely into her dressing gown, and sighed.

"Thank you," she said after a minute. "For taking away the pine cone. I wouldn’t have seen that one coming.”

SQUEAK.

**


	3. The Storm

CHAPTER THREE: THE STORM

**

Frau Schmidt came in with a stack of towels and was predictably horrified at the open window. Susan took the towels, thanked her, and opened the window again after she was gone.

Thunder rolled in the distance. The filmy inner curtains billowed. She heard the hiss and snap of rain pelting dry grass.

“I'm a bit out of my element with the teenagers,” she said to the Death of Rats. “I know at sixteen they’re not so different, in some ways, from where they are when they're three. But then the wind changes and they barely seem human.”

SQUEAK.

“It’s going to be exhausting if I have to keep wondering where she is every minute, that’s all.”

SQUEAK.

“It would be nice,” Susan said to him, “if she would just get over her little teenage snit and tell me what she’s up to. Then I could fix it, if there’s something to be fixed.”

SQUEAK SQUEAK.

The curtains billowed again and a girl came floundering through them, streaming water. She stared at Susan.

“You’re awake,” she said blankly. Susan rolled her eyes.

“It’s eight-thirty,” she said. “Of course I’m awake. Honestly, what desiccated specimens did they send you from the agency before? Did they _all_ have one foot in the grave? And whoever gave you the idea that it was polite to clamber through other people’s second-story windows?”

“The governess is always put in this room,” said Liesl, wringing out her lank hair onto a hundred-year-old Turkish carpet. “There’s a rose trellis up the wall on the outside. Louisa can climb it with her eyes closed and a whole jar of spiders in her hand.”

“She’d be better served leaving the spiders where they are,” said Susan, dropping a towel over the carpet and shooing Liesl onto it. “You’d have fewer flies.”

“You’re not going to tell Father, are you?” Liesl pleaded. “That I, uh, got locked out of the house?”

"From what I hear," said Susan, "there's not much to tell. If your young man moved any more slowly, he’d be pedaling in reverse.”

Horrified saucer-eyes in the wet face. “How do you know about Rolf?” Liesl demanded. 

Susan arched an eyebrow. Rolf, was it?

“It is my job to know things,” she said. No need to give away all her secrets, and raven-surveillance ceased to be nearly as helpful once the targets knew they were being surveilled.

Liesl bit her lip. “What do you know about – about –“

“About young men?” Susan supplied. 

Liesl flushed crimson – more from eagerness, Susan suspected, than from embarrassment. Secrets were only fun once you told them to someone.

“It’s not like we’re sneaking around. Well, not really. He’s delivering telegrams now,” she said, half-breathless, “but that’s only to get his foot in the door at the company. His brother knows someone who gets coffee for the man who does all the hiring, and the coffee person says there’s lots of turnover for telegraph operators and a young man who wants to make his mark could do a lot worse than that, especially in this day and age with the state of the country being what it is, though honestly I’m not sure what that means exactly because Father goes in his study and closes the door when his old-man friends come over to talk politics, and tells the governess to take us out for a walk. But Rolf doesn’t _want_ to be a telegraph operator, he wants to be a cryptographer and write codes, and you have to apprentice for that or do a lot of school, I’m not sure which because he only talked about it the one time, maybe a month ago, when he delivered a telegram but his throat was too scratchy to sing so we had a conversation instead, and in the meantime I don’t know what to do because I’m _sure_ Father would like him if they got to know each other but at the same time –“

“You’re all over mud from running through wet grass and shinning up the trellis,” broke in Susan, whose eyes had begun to glaze over. “If you don’t take that dress off and soak it in the bath, Frau Schmidt is going to see it in the morning and ask uncomfortable questions.” She inclined her head toward the bathroom. “Go on. There’s a spare dressing gown on the hook behind the door. Rinse out the mud and hang it to dry, and in the meantime I’ll brace myself for another run-on paragraph.”

“I wish I’d known how good it feels to _talk_ about this,” said Liesl, dazed with epiphany. The Death of Rats sniggered from underneath the bureau. Susan nudged him with her foot.

“The dress,” she prompted.

“Oh. Right.” Liesl disappeared. The bathroom door closed. Thunder rolled.

Pounding feet in the hall. Susan looked up to see Marta and Gretl in the doorway. More archaic nonsense, she thought, sniffing at the sight of their linen nightgowns. They’d be far more comfortable in pajamas. And warmer.

"Well," she said, "are you the welcoming committee?”

They shook their heads. “There’s thunder,” said Marta pitifully, and Gretl nodded. Susan wondered if anyone had taught Gretl to speak at all. Most five-year-olds couldn’t be turned off with a tap, and she hadn’t heard a peep out of this one all afternoon.

“Well,” she said, resigned, “if no one’s bothered to explain to the two of you that you needn’t fear thunderstorms, then your older siblings are likely just as misinformed. Here, sit on the bed, this floor’s drafty, we’ll have to see about slippers at some point, and we’ll wait and see who else turns up.”

“The others are too old to be scared of the thunder,” said Marta. “That’s why we didn’t knock on their door. They'd just laugh at us and say we’re babies.”

Susan saw lightning streak past her window and counted seconds. “One,” she said. “Two. Three.”

Thunder. More pounding feet. Louisa and Brigitta appeared in the doorway, slightly shamefaced.

“Did your last governess encourage this?” Susan asked, genuinely curious. “Is this what you always do during bad weather? Have a group cuddle and a singsong?” Four heads shook in unison. “Then why come to me?”

They looked at each other. Finally, Brigitta stepped forward.

“Fräulein Tilda was wheezy and old and always scolding,” she said, “but she never seemed to be in charge, not even of us. What could _she_ do about a storm?”

“Ah,” Susan said, understanding. “You want information, not comfort. Well, then, come along, hop up, scoot together and leave room at the foot of the bed. We’ll wait for everyone before getting started.”

“We won’t see the boys,” said Louisa. “Boys are brave.”

“Can be,” Susan conceded. “But the bravest person I know is a woman.”

“Really?” said Liesl, coming out of the bathroom in Susan’s spare dressing gown. “Who?”

“She used to be a witch,” said Susan. “Then she fell in love with a King, who asked her to be his Queen. And on the very day of their wedding, the elves bewitched the King and stole him away, because they wanted his kingdom.” She leaned back on her elbows and tucked her feet under her. “She was no good at fighting,” she continued. “She was a timid sort of person. And she couldn’t ride a horse. But she put on armor over her wedding dress and hoisted herself into the saddle and rode off to save him from the monsters anyway.”

“Why?” asked Gretl. It was the first word Susan had heard her say.

“Because there was no one else to do it,” Susan said. The five faces around her were all rapt and upturned, but Brigitta’s eyes were dreamy and considering and far away; that one, she thought, is the one to watch, out of all of them, the one who will be beaten with the book before she will put it down. “That is the bravery of women,” she concluded. “We do what we have to do.”

“Did she do it? Did she get him back?”

“Mm,” said Susan. “It’s a long story. One for another day.”

Lightning, outside the window. One. Two. Thunder, a mighty crack of it.

Kurt and Friedrich appeared in the doorway, panting.

“Right,” said Susan. “Friedrich, go back to your bedroom, please, and bring me a toy balloon and a brown paper bag. You have both of those items in stock? Excellent. Kurt, go down to the kitchen and bring up a spoon. It needn’t be silver; stainless will do.” She raised her eyebrows when they hesitated. “Quickly,” she said. “We are going to make thunder and lightning, and there is no time to lose.”

**

They turned off the lights and sat on pillows on the floor, as the bed wasn’t big enough. 

“Lightning,” said Susan, “occurs when warm air on the ground meets the colder air above it, in the atmosphere. This creates a thundercloud, correct?” She glanced around; seven pairs of eyes were intrigued but vacant of prior knowledge. She sighed. They’d have to go into that process in more detail another day.

“Thunderclouds are full of bits of ice,” she said. “They’re colder on the top than on the bottom. All that ice jostles around inside them and creates kinetic energy. Current.” She grinned, and the Von Trapps shivered without knowing why; in the dim light filtering through the wind-blown muslin sheers from outside, it seemed as though for just a moment, one could see all the bones underneath the skin of Fräulein Susan’s face. “Electricity,” she said. “When you get enough of it built up, there's a giant spark. That's lightning.”

“Excuse me, Fräulein Susan?” Kurt, clutching the three items she had asked for, was bouncing gently from his cross-legged position in the circle. “What does that have to do with the balloon?”

“Blow it up,” said Susan. He did. “Now – rub it on your head.”

“On my head, Fräulein?”

"Over and over," Susan said. "More than that. You are creating static with the friction, and that is another kind of energy that turns into electricity. Good, that should do it.” She nodded at Louisa, who was vibrating with impatience on her right. “Take the spoon,” she said. “Slowly, slowly, bring it closer to the balloon.”

The children watched, holding their collective breath, and exhaled in satisfaction at the tiny series of sparks that erupted. 

“It’s not big like lightning, though,” objected Friedrich. “It doesn’t do anything.”

"Small can be powerful,” said Susan, and produced from behind her back the light bulb she’d unscrewed from her bedside lamp. “Rub the balloon on your head again, Kurt. Now, Friedrich, take this bulb by the glass and move it closer to the balloon.”

“It won’t turn on,” he said. “No. Really?”

“It’s like magic,” said Brigitta, gazing at the glowing lightbulb. “Invisible energy in the air. Everywhere around us. We only have to learn how it works to see it.”

Gold star, thought Susan, but said nothing.

“What is the paper bag for?” Marta asked. “We didn’t use it to make lightning.”

“Why do you think that is?”

“You said we would make thunder too,” said Kurt. “Tiny thunder, like the tiny lightning?”

“Tiny thunder,” affirmed Susan, unfolding to her feet and blowing air into the bag. “Lightning is very hot, and makes the air around it expand so quickly that it makes a sound. Rather like when I burst this bag, and the trapped air inside it expands quickly outward.” She took a few steps toward the door, smiling despite herself; it was such a relief when the formalities were over and the teaching started to happen. “Count with me? One – two –“

“Three!” they chorused. The bag burst with a satisfying explosion of air.

There was a yell, followed by a stifled curse as a human body met the unforgiving walnut of the door jamb. Susan felt the air disturbed three inches from her face by the frantic windmilling of arms. 

The overhead light flicked on, revealing a disheveled, scowling Captain von Trapp. Susan heard the universe compress behind her as the children stopped thinking about electricity and started thinking about their place in line.

“What is the meaning of this?” snapped the Captain, glowering at the strewn pillows on the floor. “Fräulein, I’m sure I made it clear that bedtime is _strictly_ observed in this household.”

“One takes the teaching moments where one finds them,” said Susan primly. Looking at him when he was annoyed was oddly satisfying. It made her want to poke at him to see how he would respond.

"Bed," he said to the children in a voice like a funeral bell. "Now."

They scuttled away, closing the door behind them. She wondered how many times he’d had to blow the whistle at them to get them to remember to do that.

“I will not have this,” he said to her, “this – disruption of household routine.”

“Learning is disruption,” said Susan sweetly, “for it is change. You cannot learn anything worth knowing without feeling something change inside you in response, and this process, this transformation, is inherently kinetic; I would not try to contain it even if I thought I could.” She tilted her chin to a slightly more aggressive angle. “Would you have tranquility at the price of stasis, Captain? Would you have me march them about but teach them nothing, like the querulous old women you saddled them with before I agreed to rescue you?”

“Rescue me!” There was the muscle again, beating in his cheek like a metronome. His hands were fisted at his sides. “Fräulein Susan, I swear to you that if I knew of even one other potential governess in Greater Leipzig, I would—“

“But you do not,” she cut in calmly, “and so you will not. You will do what you always do, which is apparently to put them back into their line and blow your whistle at them, and then go away and pack for your trip to Vienna. I do so hope you enjoy it.”

He stared at her for a long minute. Susan, in one of her flashes of forethought, saw what he was struggling against; depending on whether or not he won the battle he was currently fighting with his self-control, he would lunge forward, trap her between his body and the ornately carved crown molding at the side of the door, and –

Well.

She forced herself back into the present moment. “I know what you’re thinking about,” she said in a low voice, “and believe me, Captain: It. Would. Be. Unwise.”

He was still staring, but he didn’t look angry anymore. “Your face,” he said shakily. “There’s a mark on it, like I slapped you.” He shook his head. “I won’t deny that I was thinking about it for a moment. You’re the most – _infuriating_ – woman.”

“You weren’t thinking about slapping me, Captain,” Susan said. “I wish you had been.” She couldn’t help but bring her hand up to her cheek. “But it’s nothing,” she said. “A birthmark, a – family heirloom of sorts. It glows a bit when I’m, ah, angry.”

He stepped back from her, breathing slowly and carefully. “My train leaves before breakfast,” he said, yanking open the door. “Do give the children my regrets that I was unable to say goodbye.”

“They’re probably still awake,” said Susan to his rapidly retreating back. “You could tell them yourself.”

He did not turn around.

**


	4. Vienna

CHAPTER FOUR: VIENNA

**

“Honestly, Georg,” said Baroness Elsa Schraeder, setting down her sterling-silver fork with its dainty bite of milk-cream strudel intact. “You’re so _moody_ this afternoon. What on earth is the matter with you?”

“Hm?” Georg followed her pointing finger to his own plate, which was covered with bits of mangled pastry. “Oh. My apologies – I am distracted today. Hardly fit company, I know.”

“More talk of war, I assume,” Elsa said, running a manicured forefinger around the rim of her coffee cup. “You needn’t give me that look, darling. I know perfectly well that you spent all morning with Herr Schlachwasser and those old Navy majors. And no—“ she warded him off with an outturned palm – “do not, I beg of you, interpret that as a request for more information. Whatever terrible thing Germany is up to now, I simply do not want to know.” 

“Pretending that all is well doesn’t make it so, Elsa.”

“Perhaps it does, perhaps it doesn’t. Perception is everything, is it not?” She shrugged one silk-jersey shoulder, letting her lashes fan on her cheeks as she did so. The shrug was impetuous, the lowered eyes choreographed, and that was Elsa for you, Georg thought, the stylized, perfected idea of Woman, juxtaposed with something fey and childlike that she hardly ever let him see.

Amused despite himself, he played along. “And what do you perceive at the moment?”

“That it’s a lovely afternoon and we’re at the Imperial, eating the most exquisite pastry in Vienna,” said Elsa. “Or at least I am; you’re just turning yours into crumbs.” She smiled at him and sipped her coffee. “So – tell me something that has nothing whatsoever to do with horrible little Herr Hitler and his fantasies of world domination. Tell me about something – domestic.”

He raised an eyebrow. "You are without a doubt the least domestic woman I know.”

She dipped her head in a mock curtsy. “Thank you, darling.”

“You cannot possibly be interested in the inner workings of my household.”

“As long as it has nothing to do with guns or ships,” said Elsa, “I shall be enthralled. I give you my word.”

“Oh, well, hmm,” Georg said, stymied. What to lead with? The new pier he’d just had built on the lake? That they’d just rollered for moles on the south lawn? The enormous jet-black raven that had stalked him from the front door to his car as he left the house for the train station two mornings ago, clacking its beak and muttering what he suspected were obscenities under its breath?

He’d been about to shy a stone at it, and then he’d remembered. It was Fräulein Susan’s pet – though, in typical Fräulein Susan fashion, she’d called it something else. _He is my – associate_.

Deeply odd, that woman. 

“Georg?” Elsa prompted. “Darling?”

“Yes, of course,” he said. “Something domestic. I hired a new governess for the children this week.”

Her pretty mouth curved. "Dear me, you do lead an exciting life when you're away from Vienna.”

“You did ask.”

“So I did. I deserve every morsel of tedium you pile upon me. What happened to the last governess?”

“Frau Schmidt said something about a chandelier. I didn’t quite catch it.” He frowned. “They leave for the most – capricious – reasons. I find it very vexing.”

“What is this one’s name?” Elsa asked. “You’ve had a Hilda and a Tilda already – are you staying with the theme?” She forked up another bite of strudel. “Gilda? Kilda? Is there any other name that rhymes?”

“You’re enjoying this rather a little too much.”

“I suppose there could be an Isilda stumping around somewhere. With a mother who liked ancient myths but couldn’t spell.”

“Susan, actually,” said Georg. Elsa frowned.

“Susan?”

“Susan Sto Helit.”

“Susan is rather a name for a _young_ woman, isn’t it?”

There was no good way to answer that question, so Georg didn’t. “She’s British,” he said, “anyhow I believe she is from her accent. A very modern thinker. Years of teaching experience. All the latest pedagogical research and whatnot.” 

An image rose before him – her face too close to his, righteous indignation in the dark eyes, cheekbone caressed by the wayward lock of high-contrast hair, that amazing, formidable bosom rising and falling four inches away from him under its thin wrap of silk. A pale handprint blooming like a white lily on her flushed cheek, as if summoned into existence by what he was thinking at the time – and she had been right about that, damn her. She was disconcertingly perceptive, even if she was a lunatic who exploded paper bags in the faces of the unwary at all hours of the night.

The children seemed to like her. That would take some getting used to.

He shifted uncomfortably in his café chair, aware of Elsa’s assessing gaze on him, and took refuge in his neglected pastry. “I thought you were going to tell me about Rudi’s soirée,” he said, loading his fork. “You and Max went, did you not? He said something about Countess Lipinski and a ‘cello.”

“Drunk out of her skull,” said Elsa shortly. “She tripped on the edge of Rudi’s new Aubusson rug and doused the string quartet with a full glass of Gewürztraminer. You never heard such whining, and honestly I don't see why they were so upset; it’s not like all four of them were playing Stradivari.” She narrowed her eyes. “Back to this governess. This – Susan.”

“I really don’t know much about her,” said Georg. “Fräulein Kilda—“

“—Hilda, wasn’t it?”

“—Fräulein _Hilda_ departed in rather a hurry just on Tuesday afternoon, and I was under pressure to find a replacement before coming into Town. Frau Schmidt is a jewel of a housekeeper, but her interest does not lie in running herd on my … well, herd.” 

“One can hardly blame her,” said Elsa into her coffee cup, “considering the number of chandelier incidents that seem to occur.”

Georg slanted her a sharp glance. “I don’t expect you to love them as your own, you know,” he said. “But kindly do not mistake me for a man with no encumbrances. When you agreed to marry me, the children were part of the package; you will have to interact with them at some point.”

She held his gaze for a moment, then let her lashes fan her cheeks in mock deference. “Of course, darling.”

“Fräulein Susan came with glowing references,” Georg said stiffly. There was a defensive, short note in his voice that he couldn’t seem to rein in. He hated it. “As well as a high recommendation from the Mother Superior of the local abbey.”

“Did she, now.”

“Her father is a clergyman of some sort, from what I gather.”

“How rigorous your interview must have been,” Elsa said silkily, “to provide you with so much personal detail.” She drained her demitasse cup and leaned forward. She had recovered her equilibrium – assuming, of course, that she had ever really lost it; there was a predatory, catlike curve to her mouth. “What does Fräulein Susan look like, Georg?”

“You’ll see her for yourself,” said Georg, “in two weeks, when you travel back with me to meet the children. Unless” – time to go on the offensive again, he thought – “you’ve decided yet again that the countryside offers insufficient charms and Vienna cannot possibly do without you? This is the third time I’ve invited you, you know.”

“Oh, no,” said Elsa lightly, “I will be on that train with you. I have given you my solemn promise.”

They were on more familiar ground here, Georg thought with not a little relief. “It’s because I finally agreed that Max could come along, isn’t it?”

“It would hardly be proper to stay in your house without a chaperone, would it?” Elsa dropped one shoulder in a half-shrug. “And besides, he’s so – entertaining. I am never bored with him around. And if your childcare situation is _truly_ the most engrossing thing that has happened to you in the month since we’ve seen each other” – she sent him a look – “I suspect I shall need all the diversion I can get.”

Georg rolled his eyes. "Frau Schmidt has been instructed to spend the next two weeks bolting down the valuables,” he said, “to limit the collateral damage. The grocery bill, I suppose, is inevitable.”

“I am so looking forward,” said Elsa, “to meeting everyone.”

“The children, you mean?”

“Of course,” she said. “Whoever else could I be referring to?” She leaned back and smiled: polished, elegant, inscrutable, gently mocking. “But I warn you now, Georg – if I am to be expected to remember all their names, I shall need you to furnish me with a mnemonic device while we are on the train.”

**


	5. Do-Re-Mi

CHAPTER FIVE: DO-RE-MI

It was her afternoon off, and they were all in Biers to celebrate – except for Cheery, who was on duty, and Violet, who had been banned for a month for adhering a customer’s hand to the table with her pocket-knife when it wandered where it shouldn’t have. That left Sally and Angua, the latter of whom looked a bit shaggier than usual because it was two nights until full moon. They were both in uniform; Susan noticed that even the rowdiest of the lunch regulars were giving their table a wide berth.

“So,” said Sally, licking crème de menthe from her straw. “How is the Roundworld job? Tell us everything.”

Susan leaned back in her chair and shrugged. “It’s a job,” she said. “I know I said I was done governessing, but it’s hard to say no to Granddad when he wants something. And there are interesting challenges inherent in it. Seven makes for a very multileveled classroom.”

"Better you than me,” said Angua, shuddering. “Seven! In eleven years! His wife was probably relieved to be dead. Did your grandfather say why this is so important?”

Susan sipped her drink and grimaced. Igor had taken a bartending course, and now everything seemed to be laced with either blue curaçao or liqueur de violette. She rather missed the old days, when all you had to avoid on his cocktail menu was anything named for a body part. “You know how he is,” she said. “If I had to guess I’d say it had something to do with an upcoming political coup. The Captain used to be a naval officer.”

“Ooh, yes,” said Sally. “Tell us about the _Captain_.” She glugged the rest of her drink and gestured to Igor for a replacement. “Look at that,” she said to Angua, “she’s rolling her eyes. You were right – there _is_ a story there.”

“There’s nothing to tell,” Susan said. “He left for Vienna the morning after he hired me – that was a little more than a week ago – and there’s been no word from him since. The housekeeper says he’s visiting some socialite he knows – Baroness Somebody-or-Other – and that he’s probably going to marry her. Which means that my sojourn in the mountains with his neglected offspring isn’t going to last very long.” She worried at her lower lip with her teeth. “Whatever Granddad thinks is going to happen,” she said, half-to-herself, “is going to happen soon.”

"Her handprint is glowing,” Sally said to Angua in what was probably meant to be an aside. Susan glared at her. “Well, it is. Tell us: what does he look like? No, wait, don’t tell us.” She grinned, unrepentant. “The narrower your eyes get, the higher up he is on the hottie scale. Ooooh. _Really?”_

“Don’t give her any more of those,” Susan said sharply to Igor as he set down a highball glass of something frothy and purple on the table. “She’s talking nonsense as it is.” She scooped some of the violet foam onto her forefinger and studied it. “What is this?”

“Best not to ask,” Angua said. “Igor takes advantage of the fact that not much can kill any of his customers.” She sipped her pint. “So, the handsome Captain is getting married.”

“The bride-to-be is coming back with him in a week,” Susan said. 

(“See, he _is_ handsome! She didn’t deny it!”)

_“Probably,”_ Susan continued pointedly, “he’s going to expect me to trot the children out in front of her for some kind of command performance. You know, one of those aren’t-they-so-sweet song and dance things. I don’t think she’s ever met them before.”

“Pity you can’t sing,” Sally said through a mouthful of purple.

“Yes, isn’t it,” Susan said with feeling. “I went through this same thing every single term, when I was teaching at the academy. Headmistresses and parents love special musical programs. Bane of my existence.”

“Bring in a ringer,” Angua suggested. “No one says you have to teach them the song yourself.”

“Who?”

"Well, there's that harp player you used to—“

“Imp and I aren’t speaking any longer,” Susan said sharply, her hair levitating out of its neat French plait and puffing itself up around her head like an affronted cat woken from a nap. Angua and Sally, recognizing the beginning of the Look when they saw it, found other places to settle their gaze.

"Well, then,” Angua said after a tense moment, twirling her glass on the table. “There’s always Agnes.”

The swirling hair settled into its customary state of disheveled-but-dormant curliness. “She’s in town?” Susan said. “Not still on tour?”

“Her contract ended a month ago,” Angua said. “She’s on summer holiday. Whether she’s here or in the Ramtops is anyone’s guess.” She raised one bushier-than-usual eyebrow. “Not that finding her will be a hindrance to _you.”_

“Well,” said Sally brightly into the slightly-awkward silence that followed. “Now that that’s settled. Shall we do another round?”

**

Agnes was in Lancre for the summer, witching. She was inside someone’s cottage just outside the village when Susan materialized outside the door, so Susan sat down with her back against a tree and waited for her to be finished. It was a beautiful day, hot and sunny and full of the thrum of insects; the air was warm and luxurious and smelled like baked grass, which was a relief after the stifling urban fug of Ankh-Morpork. A faint breeze stirred from higher up on the mountain, stirring Susan’s wayward silver curl.

These were not mountains like the Roundworld mountains, though, she thought, fishing in her pocket for yet another hairpin. Those mountains were a picture postcard; you spent every minute you were in them expecting to bump up against the painted backdrop and discover behind it an army of fast-talking men with funny haircuts and black turtlenecks.

You could live in a place like that forever, and never get tired of looking at it.

The door opened, and Agnes came out. The last time Susan had seen her had been after one of her performances, in stage makeup and evening gown. Now she was in traditional witches’ black, pointy hat and all, her friendly round face unpainted. She looked tired but happy. There was a smudge of something crusty on her nose.

“Susan,” she said, and her eyes flicked toward the door. “You’re not here – officially, are you? It looked bad at first, I’ll grant you that, but it’s only a broken toe, after all.”

"I have a proposition for you," said Susan, and led off with the beribboned box from Wienrich and Boettcher’s. Even the mildest-mannered of witches, she thought, required her tribute.

**

It was easier to convince her than Susan had thought. The rules of time, space and dimension were one thing; opera-house gossip, apparently, was quite another, and even on the Disc Agnes had heard of Kirsten Flagstad, and knew that she was singing Isolde at the Vienna Staatsoper. For a single ticket in the first mezzanine, she declared, she would teach twice as many children twice as many songs. Probably the chocolate had been unnecessary, after all, though on the other hand it certainly hadn’t hurt anything.

And so the morning arrived. Susan woke up well before dawn and went from room to room, whisking bedclothes off protesting sleepers. “Nature hike,” she said, her hair vibrating gently around her face. “We must be out the door in twenty minutes; we are catching the first train into the mountains.”

“These aren’t our regular clothes,” protested Louisa.

“That is very observant of you,” said Susan. “Notice also that they are designed to allow full range of movement, and are made from stain-resistant, ethically sourced cotton jersey. They wick perspiration away from the body and thus prevent unwanted chafing.”

“But—“

“—We will be studying the flora and fauna of an unforgiving ecosystem today, and the last thing we need to deal with is lichen stains on someone’s linen cuffs. Put them on, please, and don’t dally.”

“We’ve never been on the train before,” said a meditative Kurt, pulling on his socks. “We’ve never been _anywhere_ before.”

“Will we be back by lunch time?” This from Liesl, who apart from her unfortunate choice of romantic partners was otherwise practical-minded. There was hope for her yet, thought Susan.

"No," she said. “I have spoken to Frau Schmidt, who has packed a picnic for our luncheon. We will purchase breakfast pastries at the train station—“ she broke off to eye a yawning Marta – “if, and only if, we arrive in time to do so before the train departs.”

It was not a particularly grueling hike. It didn’t have to be, thought Susan. The point of it was to move them from a place where they thought they knew what to expect, to a place where they knew that they didn’t. This was not difficult. Children liked to move.

These children were also easily tired – it was all too clear that they hadn’t done enough of this sort of thing. Even the older ones were red-faced and out of breath by the time they reached a likely-looking meadow and spread out their blankets. They looked happy enough, though: Gretl garlanded with daisy chains, Kurt weighed down with pretty stones he’d found on the path, Liesl and Friedrich swinging the basket between them from its two handles. Susan dematerialized discreetly once they started to pass out the sandwiches, and found Agnes, guitar case in hand, window-shopping on the Mariahilfestrasse.

“How was the opera?”

“Life-altering,” said Agnes, glowing with memory. “And I’ve spent the morning researching folk songs native to the area. I am positively bristling with ideas.”

“Don’t expect too much,” said Susan, and took her by the hand.

"Now,” she said, rematerializing a few feet away from the picnic blanket. “Let’s think of something to sing for the Baroness when she comes.”

The Von Trapps’ mouths fell open.

“There’s a lady behind you, Fräulein Susan,” said Friedrich. “Where did she come from? She wasn’t here a minute ago.”

“Fräulein Nitt is a music specialist,” said Susan levelly. “I have asked her to help us put together a short musical program with which to welcome next week’s visitors. I’m sure—“ she raised an eyebrow –“that all of you remember how to properly and politely greet a visiting teacher.”

They looked at each other, then back at Susan. If further protest was to be mounted about the sudden presence of a stranger, the look said – not to mention the fact that they were pretty sure Fräulein Susan had just blinked out of the meadow and then blinked back in on the other side, five minutes later – someone else was going to have to mount it. “Good afternoon, Fräulein Nitt,” they chorused obediently.

“She has a pointy hat,” said Marta, faintly, from the relative safety of Liesl’s lap. “Is she a witch?”

“Is she the one?” demanded Brigitta. “The one who fought the Elves and rescued the King?”

“Fräulein Nitt is not here in her witching capacity,” said Susan, “but as a music specialist. Now. What songs do you know already?”

“We don’t know any songs.”

“We don’t even know _how_ to sing.”

Just as I thought, thought Susan – what else could one expect of a group so regimented and infantilized as this one? She exchanged a significant glance with Agnes. “Well, then,” she said briskly, “there’s no time to waste; you must learn.”

She left Agnes to it and removed herself to the back of the blanket in a classic I’m-watching-you-so-don’t-try-anything-funny flanking maneuver. Teachers learned it the second day and never forgot it; she herself had, on multiple occasions, fought the urge to loom up behind unruly teenagers at football matches and tell them to take off their hats.

The basket was next to her. They had saved her a sandwich – and without being reminded, no less. She took a bite. Liverwurst and cream cheese. Not her favorite, but the lettuce was still crisp and the tomato tasted like summer.

Agnes was drilling them in some kind of music-theory exercise, cleverly disguised in a catchy tune with words meant to link the nonsense syllables to concrete objects. Effective, if slightly twee. Susan ate another bite of the sandwich and kept listening. 

They could all carry a tune, she thought with mild interest. Usually there was at least one child in the middle of a pack who either yelled indiscriminately or – more often – figured out that he was melodically impaired and proceeded to develop a killer lip sync. But all seven of these children were actually _singing_. 

It was the first genuinely surprising thing about them.

Who had given them the musical gene? she wondered, licking cream cheese from her fingers. The long-dead mother? Or the Captain?

**


	6. Arrival at the Villa

CHAPTER SIX: ARRIVAL AT THE VILLA

**

The train was delayed in Amstetten. The conductor wouldn’t say why.

Normally, Georg took these kinds of inconveniences in stride. Today, however, he had Elsa and Max to contend with. To say that they were not patient travelers was like calling Josef Goebbels a bad man: accurate, but not entirely adequate to the occasion.

"Gin,” said Max smugly, fanning his cards against the tiny folding table in their first-class compartment. Elsa groaned.

“Again?” She swept her own unlucky hand into a thin stack and rapped Georg’s shoulder with it. It was meant to be a playful blow, he knew, but it had an edge of temper behind it. “Can’t you let me win just one? Georg, tell him to play nicely.”

“I’m trying to let you win,” Max said. “Is it my fault that you can’t put three cards together in a row?” He reached over and snatched Elsa’s cards. “How fortunate it was that I convinced you to play for a pound a point. I’ll be able to reconnect the telephone in my apartment, once we’ve left the hinterlands and returned to civilization.”

“You’re an awful sponge.”

“Better than being awful at cards, my dear.” He shuffled expertly, his thin aristocratic hands blurring the cards between them. “Another round?”

“Surely it won’t come to that,” Elsa said, rolling her eyes. “Georg, there’s the porter; go and ask him why we aren’t moving.”

Georg flicked a look at the porter, who looked harried and far too warm in his buttoned uniform. “A lemonade for the lady,” he said.

“Of course. Anything else, sir?”

“Double gin tonic,” Max said, “easy on the ice. Georg, aren’t you drinking?”

_Don’t tempt me,_ thought Georg. “No, nothing, thank you.”

“Darling,” said Elsa, “I beg of you to reassure me that there will be adult beverages available, once we arrive.”

“It’s Salzburg,” said Georg, “not the Outer Congo.”

“I’m aware of that,” said Elsa, just a little too sharply. “What I’m trying to ascertain, darling, is that you aren’t one of those men who is ever-so-charming in society but then dries up like an old dishcloth once you put your slippers on.”

“I ordered you lemonade because we’re not moving and there’s no air circulating in this carriage,” Georg said. “I assure you, my dear, that you may drink your body weight in champagne at dinner, if you so choose, and I will not lift a finger to stop you. In the meantime, I do beg your pardon for trying to keep you hydrated.”

“Enough, children,” said Max. “Elsa, are you in for the next hand, or must I set my sights on Georg’s wallet instead?”

“By all means, deal me in,” said Elsa, and shifted her shoulders so that she was turned away from Georg instead of sitting in profile to him. “When the conversation is lacking, cards must suffice.”

No one spoke after that, even when the train shuddered and heaved and began to lurch down the track toward Mondsee. Georg sat with his newspaper folded on his lap – his hat was on top of it, so that even if he glanced down he could not see the headlines shrieking at him – and tried not to wish that he’d ordered a drink.

**

It was better once they reached Salzburg. The car was waiting right where it should be, the sun – which had been sulking behind the clouds during their train journey – was smiling down upon them, and the breeze came off the mountains in a fresh, spirits-restoring flurry of ozone that patted his cheeks in welcome and almost took off his hat. “Shall we have the top down?” he proposed.

“Oh, yes, let’s do,” said Elsa, tucking her hair into a scarf. She had spent ten minutes in the first-class ladies’ lavatory, just before their arrival, and emerged swathed in a chic, close-fitting trench coat purchased for the occasion. Now, she shrugged off Georg’s offer of a travel duster. “How lovely this is,” she said, sliding on oversized sunglasses. “So clear and blue and crisp! And what a perfectly magical motorcar, Georg. I would have one myself if it were not so impractical, living in the city. How far is the drive to your home?”

“Twenty minutes or so,” Georg said, loading trunks into the backseat while Max leaned against the back bumper drawing on a pair of kid travel gloves one languid finger at a time. “That’s all right, Max, let me get that last one.”

“Well,” said Max. "Since you insist."

The car woke with only the slightest of grumbles. Georg pulled on his own gloves and felt his mood lift as they accelerated smoothly out of Salzburg and up the mountain road toward home. The sun shone on them, the wind blew cool and fresh on his face, and the most lovely woman in Austria rode at his side, swathed in Hermès and Balenciaga, regal as a queen and smelling faintly of Joy. She seemed to throw back the bright cool light as it touched her, limning her fair skin and pale hair in concentric rings of reflective gold and pearl, and looking at her, Georg was reassured. After all, he thought, she is Austrian, isn’t she? Take away the diamonds and the shot silk, take her down to only her skin, and she is a girl of these mountains as much as my daughters are. She must belong here, as must we all.

And just as well. For this, he thought, this is the only place where I can truly breathe.

Max was hanging over the seat divider, his friendly-goblin face at Georg’s shoulder as he chattered away to Elsa about something or other. Georg paid him little attention. “In a moment or two,” he said – almost to himself – “you’ll be able to see the lake.”

They were passing a stand of ancient larches, trees Georg had loved since boyhood and had climbed more than once. He was surprised to see them occupied today for the first time in his recent memory; a group of children were perched in their branches and were calling to each other in high, excited chirps, like birds. Something about their voices tugged at him.

“What’s all this?” Elsa said, amused. Georg shrugged. The sight had stirred a deep, long-banked longing within him. If he closed his eyes, he thought, he would be a boy again, swinging high and perilous in those ancient branches, far above the world and the cares of the earth.

“Nothing,” he said, patting her hand. “Just some of the local urchins.”

**

They disembarked at the house and were met by the servants. Elsa retired to her room to refresh herself and Max installed himself on the veranda with a pitcher of what looked like lemonade but smelled strongly of schnapps. 

Georg stopped Frau Schmidt on her way up the stairs. “The children?” he said, and she dipped her head to acknowledge the question.

“At lessons, Captain. With Fräulein Susan.”

“In the schoolroom?”

Frau Schmidt opened her mouth, then shut it again. “I don’t believe so, Captain,” she said.

“Where are they having lessons,” asked Georg, more bemused than suspicious, “if not in the schoolroom?”

“I believe it’s science this afternoon,” said Frau Schmidt, with that closed, deferent look that all the servants got when they knew more than they were saying, and with a final dipped curtsy, continued up the stairs. Georg stared after her, brow furrowed.

He washed his face and hands, changed his traveling suit for a fresh one, and went out through the French doors of the terrace, past the pastry-munching Max and down to the new pier. The lake sparkled up at him, clear and blue and – he knew this from experience – bone-chillingly cold, even now that it was early summer. On the opposite side of it rose the distant mountains, holding the lake and the villa in their sheltering embrace like a child might cradle a kitten. 

He leaned on the balustrade and let his mind drift.

“How lovely it all is, Georg,” said Elsa from behind him. “How can you bear to leave it as often as you do?”

She had changed clothes as well, into a coral-colored suit with a cropped Dior jacket that cut away to reveal a polkadot crepe-de-chine blouse, heavily ruched and with an enormous complicated bow at the hip. On a lesser woman it would have been hideous. On Elsa it was lovely, if a bit much for a house visit to the country. She was wearing a triple strand of baroque pearls and kitten-heeled shoes, and Georg noted idly that she had not called out to attract his attention until she’d navigated the stairs down into the garden.

This thought struck him as unchivalrous. He smiled at her to compensate for it.

“Pretending to be madly active, I suppose,” he said. “Activity suggests a life filled with purpose, does it not?”

This was an invitation to divert the conversation into the sort of lighthearted _bon mots_ they navigated so adeptly together. Today, however, Elsa did not take the bait. She turned her face into the breeze and studied the sparkling lake in front of them, her pretty mouth relaxed and free of its usual wry twist.

"Could you be running away from memories?” she suggested. Georg considered this.

“It could be,” he said. “Or perhaps I’m just searching for a reason to stay.”

He’d meant this to sound offhand and casually cynical, but even to his own ears the words rang with an uncomfortable sincerity. Elsa, he could see, was startled by it. Being Elsa, she recovered quickly.

“I do hope that’s why you’ve been coming to Vienna so often,” she said, sinking gracefully onto a nearby bench. Georg considered the pretty, soft-featured profile she turned to him.

“I would be an ungrateful wretch if I didn’t say that you brought some meaning back into my life,” he said. “After losing Agathe …”

She cut him off with a little shake of her head. “I give some rather glittery parties, that’s all,” she said. “But say no more; I completely understand. We’re all searching for something, all of us. In that, I’m just like you.”

Her face was as open and uncomplicated as he’d ever seen it, her lips slightly parted. Georg felt a wave of something that was almost tenderness come over him, something deeper than the intellectual, desire-laced camaraderie that he was used to feeling for her. He opened his mouth to speak – and was completely derailed by the sound of someone tossing pebbles at a glass window, from the direction of the house.

**

Dealing with the telegram delivery boy put him in a foul temper. Bad enough to hear the dreaded Siegheil coming from a baby-faced teenager barely older than his daughter. Worse yet, to be the only one truly outraged. What was it Max had said? _What’s going to happen is going to happen. Just make sure it doesn’t happen to you._

Childish, amoral, unthinkable. And Elsa had stood there, carefully practiced half-smile curving her pretty mouth, and by her very silence implied tacit acceptance, if not outright approval. That, thought Georg viciously, was a symptom of the Hitler problem, right there, that for the sake of their own self-interests, the intellectuals and the artists, the literati and glitterati of Viennese society, refused to condemn the beast for what he was.

Well, not him. He would be cut off at the knees before he would bow.

“Hello,” said Elsa softly, coming up behind him again. “You’re very far away. Where are you?”

She was as beguiling as ever, but he was no longer in a mood to countenance it. “In a world that’s fast disappearing,” he said shortly. 

What she said in response he didn’t hear; there was a shout from across the water that turned his head, and then a general clamor from the direction of a small unsteady boat. As it lurched toward in the pier, Georg recognized it as the ancient, much-patched canoe that had been in the boathouse when he bought the villa. He had thought it completely unseaworthy.

He narrowed his eyes. His _children_ were in that leaky monstrosity. They looked fitter than when he had seen them last, and a bit browner. Whatever they were wearing, it was not their sailor suits; the material looked like the stretchy knit stuff one used for bathing costumes. Friedrich and Louisa had the canoe’s paddles, and had taken them out of the water entirely to wave them at him. Marta was carrying a wicker basket the size of her own head. All seven children were on their feet, and Kurt was actually jumping up and down. The little craft rocked precariously.

And there, there was Fräulein Susan, in a wool dress the color of gunmetal, sitting in the prow like the figurehead of a Spanish galleon, utterly unperturbed by the chaos going on around her. He heard her say something about aerodynamics, as the canoe went over on its side, and centrifugal force, and – with a roll of her eyes – gravity. 

And then they were in the water.

_I cannot control the world,_ thought Georg. _But I can have my say, at least, about this._

He reached for his whistle.

**


	7. Showdown at the Lake

CHAPTER SEVEN: SHOWDOWN AT THE LAKE

**

Susan had expected the children to be subdued upon the Captain’s return. He seemed to have that effect on them. She had not counted on the bracing counteractive qualities of frigid lake water on their inhibitions. Their initial gasps of dismay turned into splashing and giggles; if he hadn’t started in with the shouting and the whistle-blowing, she thought, they would have happily stayed in the water and played Marco Polo until they turned as blue as their jerseys.

Once out of the lake, however, their high spirits deserted them in short order. Susan paused, treading water while she righted the canoe, and watched them line up on the dock, shivering and cringing like kicked puppies. Friedrich’s lips were quivering – whether with dismay or with cold, Susan didn’t know. The little ones were on the verge of tears. 

The Captain whipped Louisa’s sodden bandana off her head in one quick, violent motion. Susan saw her try, not quite successfully, to control a flinch, and narrowed her eyes at him. 

There was absolutely no need for that.

He snapped an order at them and they fled toward the house. Susan snugged the canoe up to the dock and secured it with a methodical bowline knot, then settled the empty lunch basket inside and pulled herself up onto the pier. The Captain had – with some difficulty, she imagined – tamped his temper back down to the point where he had control over it, and was seething a few meters away from her on the grass, twirling his whistle viciously on its string. She could feel his angry eyes on her. 

They were about to have a difficult conversation. Well, so be it. She had things to say to him, too.

Her waterlogged dress was heavy and constricting. She found a spot of sunshine in the dappled shade where they were standing and inhaled it in, focusing and gathering the warmth of the air around her and using her own body heat to intensify and meet it. The wool fibers dried and tightened as they expelled water.

She stepped out of her personal cloud of lanolin-scented steam – the whole process had taken the space of a few breaths – and performed a quick self-evaluation. Better, she decided. Still a bit squishy in the shoes, and her hair had taken the opportunity to expel all its pins and go full-on Medusa, which couldn’t be helped, but still, better. She twitched her cuffs straight and aimed her gaze straight past the Captain’s left shoulder to the perfectly-coiffed, rather-too-perfectly-blonde woman standing next to him.

“You must be Baroness Schraeder,” she said, nodding. “Susan Sto Helit. How lovely to meet you at last. My father always spoke so warmly of the summer he spent trout fishing with your uncle Jussi in Lichtenstein.”

Elsa Schraeder’s polite half-smile did not waver, but her eyes flickered back in her head for an instant. Susan saw the moment that she registered and connected her name with its corresponding title; the smile froze for a nanosecond, then warmed a few degrees from Underling to Outranked, wavering ever-so-slightly at Peer.

“I am delighted to meet you, Duchess,” she said, inclining her chin. “How extraordinary that our paths should cross under –“ her gaze flicked toward the lake – “such interesting circumstances.” 

“Isn’t it, though,” agreed Susan. Behind her, the Captain emitted a strangled growl.

“I want a word with you, Fräulein,” he said. Susan thought rather better of him for not switching straightaway to ‘Duchess’.

“Of course.”

“I think I’d better go see what Max is up to,” murmured Elsa, and beat as hasty a retreat as could be expected of her, considering the impracticality of her shoes. Susan pivoted on her heel and fixed Captain von Trapp with a bland stare.

“Yes, Captain?”

“Duchess?” he demanded.

“I prefer not to use my family title when I’m working.”

“How … progressive of you.”

“Not at all,” said Susan. “It’s a matter of practicality. The title tends to make my employers nervous.”

“It is true,” said the Captain, “that you wear on my nerves. But your genealogy has nothing to do with it.”

“I am so relieved to hear that.”

A muscle beat in the corner of the Captain’s eye. “I want a truthful answer from you, Fräulein,” he said. “Have my children been climbing trees today?”

Susan consulted her watch, which had stopped ticking. She tapped it, frowning, and it sprang to life again. “For about ninety minutes in the early afternoon,” she said. “There’s a lovely stand of old larches on the southeast border of your property that host an astonishing array of indigenous insect life. That’s why they attract so many songbirds, you know.”

The Captain frowned. “Oh?”

“Nature study is best observed when one is in Nature,” said Susan. “Also, the act of climbing a tree is an excellent workout of all the major core-group muscles. It’s cardiovascular, but also weight-bearing.” She gave him a thin smile. “Ninety minutes of that is equivalent in terms of calories expended and muscle growth to approximately four and three-quarters hours of marching passively about in a garden. For example.”

Possibly, she thought, she shouldn't have said that last bit. She’d had him well on his way to being too confused to be angry – and then she’d gone just one sentence too far and reminded him that he was annoyed with her. “And these –“ he demanded, brandishing Louisa’s dripping headscarf. “These --?”

“Physical education uniforms,” supplied Susan. “They allow for free range of motion, are moisture-wicking and non-chafing, and are ethically sourced from organic cotton jersey—“

“Play clothes,” said the Captain flatly. “They look like bathing costumes. May I devoutly hope, at least, that they have not been worn past the boundaries of my estate?”

“You may hope what you like,” said Susan, “but as I was not instructed to the contrary, I have not limited the children’s exposure to the city and its environs.”

“Do you mean to tell me that my children have been all over Salzburg, dressed up in nothing but—but—“ The Captain shook the headscarf wildly. Susan nodded.

“And having a marvelous time,” she said. “I admit that I thought them a bit on the stunted side when I first met them. But there’s nothing really wrong with them, after all; they’ve just been limited socially and not encouraged to be intellectually curious.”

“Stunted!” The Captain stared at her. “I will not forgive you for that.”

“You are the one who needs to be forgiven,” said Susan. “They didn’t stunt themselves.”

**

Georg liked to think of himself as unshockable. He had commanded a submarine in the Great War, after all. He’d led men, learned their names and seen the pictures of their families and found out everything there was to know about them. He'd had to watch some of them die. Others he'd killed, shiploads of them at a time, men he didn't know but who presumably had their own families, their own names and pictures and stories. The medals in the top drawer of his dresser attested to the fact that he’d cheated death himself a dozen times. Afterwards he had been delighted to lock all those memories away with the medals and focus on Agathe and the children. Peacetime agreed with him.

And then there had been the scarlet fever that carried Agathe away from him: the fist-sized glands, the strawberry rash sweeping her face and chest, the swollen, peeling tongue, the burning heat of her skin no matter how they tried to cool her with poultices and wet cloths. She had raved for hours before she died in his arms, delirious and mad with pain and fever; she hadn’t known him, had cursed him in fact, twisting away from his touch, calling piteously for her father and mother. 

That night had been far worse than anything he’d seen in the war.

He couldn’t bring himself to hold baby Marta after that, who had suffered the same affliction but rallied through it. What sort of sick cosmic joke spared the child, only to strike down the mother? Where was God in that? Where was justice?

He had done his duty by them, he thought, simmering with outrage. Hadn’t he? Weren’t they fed and clothed, weren’t they looked after and educated? Wasn’t that enough? Did it matter that it hurt to look too long at them, to see the face of his dead wife pressing its way to the surface through their features?

And who was this woman, this noblewoman masquerading as a governess, this unnatural, uncanny creature who walked out of a lake without a drop of water on her, who was she to tell him he was a bad father?

“Don’t,” he said, his voice trembling with rage, “don’t you dare discuss my children with me.”

She lifted one unimpressed eyebrow. “Liesl,” she said. “Navigating the perils of adolescence with no guidance to speak of, like a raft in fast rapids. I’m willing to wager that you have no idea where she spends her evenings, nor whom she spends them with. In another few months she will have completed the transfer of her affections and will no longer actively seek your approval; you’ll have lost the one bit of leverage you still possess in the relationship, and the minute you say the wrong thing she’ll be out the window, down the trellis and away on the back of a messenger bicycle. A disaster waiting to happen.”

“Don’t you say a word about Liesl.”

“Friedrich,” said Susan. “Sensitive, diffident, artistic. Struggling with his sexuality, clearly, though where that’s going I couldn’t say for certain yet. It’s only been a couple of weeks, after all. Not that he’s going to talk to you about that. He finds you intimidating and unapproachable. When he looks at himself in the mirror he doesn’t see you or anything like you, and he’s afraid that’s what you think, too.”

“How dare you talk to me about my son!”

“Louisa could tell you about him,” said Susan. “She notices everyone and everything. She especially notices that there’s no tenderness in your hand when it comes toward her.” She advanced on him a step, her wild hair waving about her face. There was an edge to her tone that hadn’t been there before. Her skin seemed to tighten over her features, sharpening them in a way that made the hair stand up on the back of Georg’s neck. “Kurt is good at showing people the face he thinks they want to see, and that’s dangerous for both of you. Brigitta lives in her head because that world speaks to her in a way that this one doesn’t. That can be dangerous, too.” She backed him up another step. “The two little girls can’t remember a time when you ever acted like you loved them. There’s time to fix that, but it’s slipping through your fingers. If I were you I’d—“

“That is enough!” Georg shouted, mortified to hear a crack in his voice. Susan didn’t budge.

“I’m not finished yet,” she said.

“Oh, yes you are, Duchess,” he said. His hands were shaking. He felt naked, and worse than naked, like her words had carved away his skin and left him raw and oozing in front of her. “Yes, yes you are. I don’t care who you are, I don’t care how good a teacher you are or how impeccable your recommendations, I don’t even care that the children seem, God help them, to like you. I want you gone.” He knew he was snarling this, that he looked like a beast and was acting worse. He couldn’t seem to stop himself. “I want you gone,” he repeated, his voice breaking again. “Get out of my sight and pack your bags and don’t you ever come back.”

They looked at each other for a long moment. The frightening hard surfaces under her skin had disappeared, Georg thought distantly, or maybe he’d been so upset that he’d imagined them. She just looked tired now, suffused with resignation and regret. “Very well,” she said. “I imagine that’s for the best.”

It was then that the music started.

It was a simple little thing, a folk song, charmingly arranged for treble voices with a high solo descant arching gracefully over each half-cadence. It was the shimmer of that high single voice that caught in Georg’s throat; it sounded so much like Agathe that he almost looked around to see where the ghost was standing. “What’s that?” he said inanely.

“I brought in a colleague of mine,” Susan said, “to teach the children some folk songs native to this region. I thought your guests might be expecting to be entertained.”

Georg took a few steps toward the sound. “Lovely,” he said softly. “That solo voice, that’s—“

“Liesl,” said Susan. “Of all of them, hers is the most developed instrument. She said you and her mother used to sing with them. She and Friedrich are the only ones who really remember much, but it’s she who chose this song. She said it was a favorite of yours.”

“I had no idea she still knew it.”

“My colleague says that music occupies a singular place in memory,” said Susan. “She says that once you learn it, it never truly leaves you.”

They were up the steps, almost to the terrace; Georg felt drawn by the sound, impelled to reach its source before the song was over. And yet—

He reached for her wrist and laid his hand on it, careful not to let his fingers grasp. He was supplicating here, not demanding.

“I was wrong,” he said. “Forgive me. I don’t really know my children.”

“There’s still time,” said Susan after a moment. “They want very much to be close to you.”

“Will you stay?” he asked, and watched her consider it, weighing her options behind her lovely, unreadable eyes.

“I do have some packages arriving in a day or so,” she said finally. “What a bother it would be for the servants to have to forward them on.” 

She removed her wrist from under his fingers and gave him a little push on the arm. “Go on, then," she said. “I have it on very good authority that you know all the words.”

He went.


	8. The Lonely Goatherd

CHAPTER EIGHT: THE LONELY GOATHERD

**

The nursery-turned-schoolroom was on the top floor of the house. This was not uncommon among the households of the aristocracy, but Susan did find the tradition unfortunate. How well could anyone, child or adult, function in stuffy, poorly ventilated quarters full of broken toys and all the furniture no one wanted to put anywhere else?

Science they studied outside, when the weather was fine, with a generous helping of practical maths tossed in. Reading she allowed them to do anywhere they wanted to: their rooms, the garden, the boathouse, the shade of any hospitable tree; Gretl and Marta, still relative beginners to this pleasure, liked to have Susan close at hand, in case they needed help sounding out words, but the others scattered to whatever private corners of the estate they had marked as their own particular favorites. Geography and history, Susan handled the way she always had. It might look, to the rest of the household, like she and the children were tucked away upstairs, but once the door was closed they spent most of their time in what she thought of as Travel.

She was used to doing Travel with small children, who could be relied upon to accept any number of impossible wonders as a matter of course on her say-so. Involving teenagers was a bit more complicated.

“It has to be science,” Susan overheard Liesl whisper one morning to Friedrich, as the class hovered over a line of parterres in the front gardens just outside Versailles. “Because if it isn’t science, it has to be magic. And there’s no such thing as magic.”

“It can’t be science,” Friedrich had whispered back. “Because if it were science, anyone could do it who knew how.”

“How do we know they don’t?”

“If anyone who knew how could do it,” Friedrich reasoned, “then the Germans would definitely know. And they’d already be here, wouldn’t they? They’d be _everywhere_.”

Below them, the Dauphin appeared at a balcony, wig slightly askew, and promised – a thread of panic in his voice – to abandon his palace and return to Paris. A ragged, hard-faced crowd of pitchfork-wavers sent up a cheer of triumph. The Von Trapp teenagers, oblivious of their box seats to the Revolution, continued to bicker.

“But if it’s magic,” Liesl insisted, low-voiced, “then why doesn’t Fräulein Susan magic that nasty Herr Hitler to the middle of the ocean and drop him?” She prodded Friedrich’s shoulder with one finger. “Because she _can’t,_ that’s why. There must be _rules._ ”

“It was morning when we left twenty minutes ago,” Friedrich pointed out, and now it’s dark outside. And we’re only in France! You know it won’t even be tea time when we get back! How can that be science?”

“Shut up, both of you. We could be back in the schoolroom, memorizing dates and sweating until we’re stuck to our chairs,” Louisa snapped at them, just before they caught Susan giving them Teacher Eye and lapsed into guilty silence. “Who cares how it happens? Why do you two always have to _dissect_ everything to death?”

**

“I think I’ve figured out why Granddad’s interested in Roundworld,” Susan said in Biers the next afternoon. “I went through all the old newspapers I could find in the house library. Remember how I said it was some kind of political thing? I’m fairly certain I was right about that. The next country over from where I am has a madman in charge, and he’s trying to take over the world.”

Cheery and Angua nodded dutifully. Sally yawned.

“Doesn’t Roundworld have some kind of political upheaval every other minute?” she said. “What makes this one so special? And for Om’s sake don’t toy with us like this. What is going on between you and Captain Hot Pants?”

“Nothing is going on between us,” said Susan, nettled. “His fiancée is at the villa for an extended visit, along with someone she’s calling their chaperone but who I suspect is really just her gay best friend.”

“How’s that going?”

“They don’t appear until lunchtime, usually,” said Susan. “After that they spend the afternoon sitting on the terrace, getting soused on spiked lemonade and gossiping about their mutual acquaintances in Vienna, all of whom they seem to despise.”

“Charming,” said Angua with a grimace. “What happens when it rains?”

“You’ve never heard such whining.”

“How does the Captain feel about all this?”

“For the first week or so, he sat there with them and pretended to nod along. Now he mostly leaves them to it.”

“Not exactly an enthusiastic host, then,” Sally said. Susan considered this.

“To be fair,” she said, “they’re awfully tiresome. And he seems preoccupied with politics at the moment, which they never want to talk about.”

“Well,” said Cheery, “he is former military, right?” She quaffed daintily, pinkie finger uplifted, and set her tankard gently back on the table. Her beard was dyed three different colors of blonde in progressive degrees from dishwater to platinum. Earlier conversation had already established a) that this effect was called “ombré,” and b) that Cheery regretted its procurement but was afraid that dyeing the beard back to its original color would result in breakage and thinning. The consensus at the table had been that she should live with it for a few months, and maybe try braiding in some ribbons. “You can hardly blame him for taking an interest. My uncle Salty re-enlisted for at least three different Dwarf Wars, maybe more. The family lost count after a while.”

“Doesn’t he know himself?” Angua asked, curious. Cheery shook her head.

“Blow to the head with an axe handle,” she said. “Short-term memory is shot. But you should see the dent it put in his helmet! They keep it on the mantel now and store flints in it.” She quaffed again. “Sometimes he wakes up shouting. Grandmum got him a therapy rat to help him deal with the nightmares. He named it Treacle and it has to wear a little sweater, so no one in the family mistakes it for a regular rat and tries to eat it.”

There was a pause as the table’s inhabitants digested this information.

“The point,” said Susan tartly, “is that there must be something about this particular war that has Granddad – pardon the expression – spooked.”

“No,” said Sally, “the point is that Captain Hammer doesn’t seem particularly interested in this vapid woman who’s supposedly his lady love.”

“He is more interested in the children than he was previously,” said Susan. “That’s taking up a bit of his time.” She took a meditative sip of her gin and tonic. “Did I tell you he plays the guitar? I won’t lie, that was a bit of a shocker.”

“And there’s been no more nastiness since you yelled at him by the lake?” Angua wanted to know. Susan shook her head.

“Smooth sailing,” she said. “I’m beginning to think there’s a decent human being under all that hair.” 

**

The others ordered another round, but Susan excused herself; she had another stop to make, this one slightly more complicated in process than most of her other transports. “Professor,” she said, levitating gently, to the back of a bent, messy-haired head. “Is it safe to touch down?”

Leonard of Quirm looked up from his notepad and smiled.

“Two metres to the left,” he said. “How lovely to see you again, Miss Susan.”

“Likewise,” said Susan, letting her feet gingerly touch the floor. “Are you well?”

“Well enough,” said Leonard. “I have the device you asked me for. Do you happen to have—?”

Susan held out a packet. “Swiss,” she said. Leonard peeled back a corner of foil and sniffed appreciatively.

“Exquisite.” He gestured to a box on a nearby table. “And here is the device.”

The box was about the size of a Labrador retriever. Susan eyed it, dubious. “It looks a bit … small,” she said.

“Once out of the travel case, it will expand,” Leonard assured her, breaking off a square of chocolate and nibbling. “There are directions in the box. Do please ignore the writing on the back side of the first sheet; I have been toying with the idea of a sort of enclosed all-terrain vehicle suitable for withstanding even a fairly aggravated assault. One needs only to reverse the rotors in the third step of assembly … but then, of course, the children would find it useless for puppets. So do be careful.“

“I will take all the necessary precautions,” said Susan, resolving to burn the directions when she was finished with them and bury their ashes. “Thank you so much, Professor. I am sure we will all find it most diverting.”

**

The device, once out of the box, was an elegant yet whimsical marvel of architecture that took up most of the west side of the ballroom. Susan, who had slipped out of bed to complete the assembly under cover of darkness, was gratified by the children’s shrieks of amazement the next morning, but less pleased by their assumption that Max Detweiler was responsible for making the wonderful object appear.

“Can we really and truly keep the puppet show, Uncle Max?” Marta said, breathless. Max waved a languid hand.

“Of course, darling,” he said. “Why else would I have had the bill sent to your father?”

Susan fixed him with a Look. He blinked, swallowed, and wilted hastily away in the direction of the Baroness.

They spent the better part of a week putting together the performance. Susan considered it educational time well spent, from the writing and revising of the script to the physical calculations necessary to run the drops and manipulate the marionettes. Agnes – for the price of concert tickets to hear Richard Tucker in _La gioconda_ – contributed a grand musical finale, and shepherded Liesl through the process of writing a vocal arrangement and composing the high descant.

They performed, exultant, to a captive audience: the Captain, Max, a restive Baroness, and whichever members of the household staff could be easily corralled for the occasion. The applause was for the most part enthusiastic, and the curtain calls extended. Susan, who had been supervising the puppetry from atop the theater’s grand façade, was surprised, while descending the last step to the floor, to feel a courteous hand on her elbow.

“Brava,” said the Captain with more warmth than was absolutely necessary. He had been laughing; his eyes were still lit with merriment and the vertical lines between his eyebrows had, at least for the moment, smoothed themselves away. He looked ten years younger and far more charming than Susan would have thought possible. “A tour de force, Fräulein. You are to be congratulated.”

“My dear,” said the Baroness, adroitly inserting a hip into the space between them and appropriating the Captain’s hand to her own arm. Her lips were curved to Pleasant and her eyes were set on Frost. “Is there anything you _can’t_ do?”

“I’m not much good at meaningless small talk,” said Susan. “Perhaps you could give me some pointers sometime.”

The Baroness ignored this salvo. “Georg,” she said, her perfect teeth set perhaps just a little too firmly together. “Such a pity to use this beautiful ballroom only for the children’s amusement. How long has it been since you hosted a proper ball?”

The Captain looked startled, then blank-faced. Susan could tell that he was doing math in his head. A shadow passed through his eyes, presently, and he shook his head. “I couldn’t say, Elsa,” he said. “It has been some time, certainly.”

“I’ll tell you what would really fill this house with music,” said the Baroness, squeezing his upper arm. “You must give a grand and glorious party for me while I’m here, and introduce me to all your friends." She smiled up into his eyes. "They should meet me, and I should meet them – don’t you think?”

She really was very clever, Susan thought, to bring this up not only in front of Max, who could be relied upon to support her agenda, but also the children. She watched the Captain’s gaze scan the surrounding clump of excited, expectant faces, and saw the moment when his reservations shattered under the weight of their hope.

“Of course, darling,” he said, and did his best to smile. “It’s been quiet far too long, hasn’t it?”

**


	9. Preparations for the Ball

CHAPTER NINE: PREPARATIONS FOR THE BALL

**

“Georg, darling,” said Elsa at breakfast. “Do you have plans for the day?”

“I’m expecting a call this morning,” Georg said, “around ten o’ clock. Otherwise I am at your service. What is your pleasure?”

“My pleasure,” said Elsa, “includes the morning, and I’m afraid we must leave before ten. Max is scouting talent for the Salzburg festival and needs to take your car and driver to Piesendorf to hear the choir at St. Laurentius.” She smiled at him, radiant and silvery in her blue silk shirtwaist and pearls. “And I am meeting with the conductor of the string orchestra you hired for the party, to choose the music, and perhaps browsing through the shops in Salzburg afterwards, for a new hat. I thought we three might make a day-excursion of it. Can your call be put off until tomorrow?”

Georg shook his head. “My call is business,” he said, “not pleasure.”

Elsa made a face. “What a pity.”

The impending call was from Georg’s old navy commander, Herr Niedermayer, now a high-ranking official in the Austrian Council of State. Its purpose was politics from beginning to end, and during it Niedermayer was likely to impart classified information. Not only would Elsa and Max find it tiresome, Georg thought, but perhaps it was best they not know it was taking place at all. 

He smiled at Elsa and squeezed her hand.

“Take the car; Franz will drive you wherever you need to go,” he suggested. “Max can hear his choir and you can meet with the conductor. I’ll saddle Schneeglocke – he needs exercise anyway – and ride into town to meet you for afternoon tea at Café Tomaselli.”

“Tomaselli?”

“The most venerable café in Austria,” said Georg. “Coffee and apfelstrudel since 1705. You will adore it. It’s on the Altermarkt; Franz knows how to find it.”

“Are you quite certain, darling?”

“Perfectly certain,” said Georg. He pushed back his chair. “I know I’m a dull host,” he said, standing up and brushing a kiss into her hair. “You’re an angel to put up with me.”

“Did you hear that, Max?” said Elsa. “Georg thinks that I’m an angel.” She struck a pose: shoulders lifted, arms outstretched and fingers spread like pinfeathers, chin in a piquant point. “I wonder if Givenchy makes wings.”

“Does Givenchy make earplugs?” said Max sourly. “Because if he does, I want a pair. Or, barring that, a different bedroom. A small herd of cattle stampeded past my door at the crack of dawn.” He drained his coffee cup. “I assume it was cattle, anyway. Do cattle giggle? Or sing?”

“I did wonder why the children weren’t at breakfast,” said Georg. “Elsa, did Frau Schmidt say anything to you about where they might have gone?”

Elsa looked blank. “That explains why it’s so exquisitely quiet this morning,” she said. “And why we haven’t yet run out of jam for the crêpes. I was wondering about that.” She shot him a look from under her lashes. “I am surprised, though, Georg, that you don’t already know all about it.”

“And why is that?”

“Why, wherever they are,” she said archly, “Fräulein Susan must be with them. And you never let her get too far out of your sight, do you?”

“And what is the _point_ of them singing,” demanded Max, aggrieved, “I ask you, what is the point of them even drawing breath to open their chirpy little throats, if you won’t consider the idea of entering them in the Festival?” He twisted his napkin, eyes screwed up in pain. “Why would you deny me the absolute triumph they would be, Georg? Do you really despise me that much?”

Georg looked from one of them to the other and decided that strategic retreat was the only viable option. “See you at teatime, darling,” he said, and blew Elsa a kiss. “Both of you have a lovely morning, won’t you?”

**

The call from Niedermayer was as upsetting as he had imagined it might be. 

Elsa and Max had argued about this with him just last evening. “At least there is no more civil war,” Max had said, “no more street violence. Remember the riots from two years ago? The looting? Schuschnigg is on the right track, taking a diplomatic approach.”

“Schuschnigg is spineless and short-sighted,” Georg had retorted. “The Nazi Party was banned in Austria after the police put down those riots for a _reason,_ Max. Hitler was camped on our doorstep at the Bavarian border!”

“The July Agreements –“

“Oh, don’t talk to me about the July Agreements,” Georg snapped. “All they mean is that we have released from prison the ringleaders of the very unrest you just spoke of, we have allowed those pro-German rags to resume publishing their seditious propaganda, we have Hitler’s allies infiltrating the Council of State and heading up the Foreign Ministry …” He could hear himself beginning to shout, and stood up to pace away his agitation. “How can you possibly see this as acceptable, as _diplomacy,_ when Germany has made such massive inroads into our political infrastructure and conceded us nothing? How can you see it as anything but the most insidious sort of treason?”

The way they had looked at him, he thought, grinding his teeth. So … puzzled, like they couldn’t understand his anger. “Darling,” Elsa had said finally, laying a bejeweled hand on his arm, “it’s just _politics._ It doesn’t change anything about the way we live.”

He found this deep _naïveté_ of hers frustrating in the extreme – and yet, he supposed it was only a product of her experience. Perhaps he would feel the same, had he not been in the Great War and seen its horrors firsthand. 

He and Elsa were both insulated from political fallout, after all, by wealth and title. And how seductive it was, he thought, this do-nothing-offend-no-one viewpoint of hers. If Austria fell from within, collapsing into annexation without a shot fired, would Elsa not go hat shopping the next day, beautiful and blithe as the day before? Would the shadow of the swastika fall as far as the gates of his villa?

Of course it would, he thought, and shuddered. It would cast its ugly pall on all of them. Even now, in this lovely tranquil book-lined room, with the sun shining in the window and a pair of larks singing outside, he could smell smoke and hear the thud of approaching jackboots.

Sick at heart, unable to bear his own company another moment, he threw down his newspaper.

“Do you know where the children are this morning?” he inquired of Frau Schmidt, meeting her in the upstairs corridor. She shook her head.

“They haven’t gone too far, Captain,” she said. “The Fräulein would have asked me to pack a lunch basket, and she didn’t.” She shifted the stack of linens she was carrying to her other hip. “Young Friedrich did say something about them working on some kind of special presentation for the party. He said they needed to practice.”

“Thank you, Frau Schmidt,” Georg said, and exited the villa by the garden doors, not bothering to take his hat.

A distraction, that’s what he needed. Something to take him out of himself, if only for a few moments. And – jealous or not – Elsa was right, damn her: whatever else she was, Fräulein Susan could be reliably depended upon to be interesting.

**

They were in the hedge maze at the back of the garden. He followed the high fluting sound of child-voices and came upon Louisa and Brigitta first. 

“No, silly,” Louisa was saying. “It’s the right arm that goes in the same direction as the lifted leg. It’s the left arm that stays down, with the toe. See: we _flit,_ we _float,_ we _fleetly flee—“_

“Is that really the way the ballerina at the Borshoi did it?” Brigitta said, frowning. “I thought it was the other way around. Lifted leg and opposite arm.” She rose to her toes and struck a balletic pose. “It’s more graceful that way,” she said. “More balanced.”

“I think it’s harder.”

“That’s because you’re still lifting with your knee bent. Remember how Fräulein Susan pointed that out? Real ballerinas keep their leg straight and it’s the thigh muscle that lifts.”

“Oh, right,” said Louisa, watching intently. “Let me try again. Yes, that feels better. We _flit,_ we _float,_ we _fleetly flee_ …”

“Since when have you two been to the Borshoi?” said Georg, stepping into view. Brigitta skipped over to him and laced her fingers through his. 

“Hello, Father,” she said, tipping up her face and fixing him with dark eyes as wide and guileless as spring pansies. “We went last Wednesday. Between tea and dinner.”

Georg smiled indulgently and felt his spirits lift. “All the way to Russia and back?” he teased. Brigitta nodded. “And what did you see?”

“ _Swan Lake_ ,” she said, and hummed a fragment of melody that Georg was surprised to recognize as the _pas de deux_. “That’s Tchaikovsky. The most realistic part is that there’s an evil swan. They’re pretty birds, Fräulein Susan says, but they're not nice at all.” She pressed a little closer to him. “Isn’t it useful to know, Father, that pretty and nice aren’t always the same thing?”

“Indeed,” said Georg, slightly shaken. “Though you—“ he tapped the end of her nose to make her giggle —“are definitely both.”

“Father,” said Louisa with authority, “we need to practice. And this is supposed to be a _surprise._ ”

“Right,” said Georg. “I’ll leave you to it. Where are the others?”

They pointed him farther into the maze and went back to their rehearsal. Georg walked along the shaded path, trailing his fingers along the manicured boxwood hedge to his left and trying to remember if there was a record of _Swan Lake_ in Agathe’s old collection of Victrolas.

That had to be it. Surely. But then where had Brigitta gotten that idea about not bending her knee?

“…there’s nothing that rhymes with _au revoir,”_ said Liesl crossly, “unless you stay in French for the rhyme, and you’ve already done that joke in your verse.” She tapped her pencil against her lower lip. “You know, anybody who actually speaks French is going to think you’re saying goodbye to _the eyes, the eyes, the eyes.”_

“That’s what makes it comedy.”

“If you say so. The point is, we can’t use the same device twice.”

“It wouldn’t work anyway,” Friedrich agreed. “All the words that rhyme are infinitive verbs. _Voir. Devoir. Recevoir.”_

“And those all have _voir_ in them to begin with, so I bet you tonight’s dessert that if we try to use one of them, Fräulein Susan will tell us it’s a lazy rhyme and make us do the whole verse over.” Liesl looked around. “Where is Fräulein Susan, anyway? She would have an idea.”

“Marta knows her part already and so does Gretl,” said Friedrich. “So Fräulein took them into the center of the maze by the sundial, to do maths.” He jerked a shoulder toward another outcrop of shrubbery. “Kurt is still wailing over there trying to find his highest falsetto note. He’s been at it for an hour; he must have steel vocal chords.”

“They couldn’t be steel,” objected Liesl. “They wouldn’t be nearly flexible enough to vibrate if they were. Whalebone, maybe, if it was thin enough. Like a tiny little corset in his throat.” She nibbled the end of the pencil. “What if we switched the order of the words in the first half of the couplet? Instead of _auf Wiedersehen, au revoir,_ it could be _au revoir, auf Wiedersehen.”_

“That works,” Friedrich agreed. “What rhymes with _Wiedersehen?_ ‘Main’. ‘Bane’, as in—“ he paused to think—“‘this assignment is of my existence the bane’.”

“You think you’re funny, but you’re not.”

“’Lane,’ then. As in Lovers’.” He grinned at her. “You should know all about that. You could write _verses_ and _verses.”_

“Pain,” said Liesl darkly, poking him with the pencil’s eraser end.

“Ow.”

“Oh,” she said, sitting bolt upright. “That’s it. That’s actually perfect.”

Friedrich stopped rubbing his shoulder. “What’s perfect? ’Pain’? Really?”

“Not ‘pain’, you dolt, ‘champagne,’” she said. “There must be a way to make that work. And it’s a very festive word – it will fit right in to the party theme.”

“How can you write about champagne, when you’ve never even tasted it?”

Their French accent wasn’t bad, actually. Stifling a chuckle, Georg continued past them unseen into the heart of the maze, toward the sundial.

It was one of the prettiest spots in the garden, a thirty-meter circle of impeccably tended turf protected by high hedges on all sides, planted with lily beds and climbing roses around the edges, and anchored at the center with an enormous bronze sundial on a marble slab. At the center of the dial, a three-dimensional Minotaur reared its horned head, mouth open in an eternal bellow of rage. Four heavily carved stone benches encircled the dial in graceful quarter-moon arcs. 

Georg paused in the shadow of the maze’s entrance, reluctant to announce himself. All these weeks, and he had yet to see Fräulein Susan in educational action. This seemed a perfect opportunity.

She had spread a blanket on the side of the grass circle that was now in shade, and was seated on the ground in a puffy pile of navy-blue skirts, quizzing Gretl and Marta on their subtraction tables. Georg was surprised to discover that the quiz was in the form of a simple game. Fräulein Susan alternated between the two girls with questions – simple ones for Gretl, slightly more difficult for Marta – and for each correct answer, that girl was permitted to move a marker closer to a finish line at the edge of the lawn. His daughters were beside themselves with excitement, laughing and running the length of the course and shrieking numbers at the tops of their lungs to her increasingly rapid-fire questions. 

He felt a stab of envy. His relationship with all the children had steadily improved, since the day of the difficult conversation at the boathouse. But Gretl and Marta were still the best-behaved versions of themselves in his presence, smiling and eager for affection, but also reserved and shy. He had never seen them run, these two. He had never heard them laugh out loud.

His own fault. His error to amend.

The markers were odd, he thought, squinting to try and see them more clearly. One was – oh, it was Fräulein’s pet raven, advancing one stately step for each correct answer Gretl gave and stepping backwards if the answer was incorrect. Well, they were reputed to be intelligent, ravens, though he had never known anyone to claim that they were good at maths.

And what was the other marker, the one for Marta’s answers? He couldn’t see it clearly; it was smaller than the raven, and stood upright, in a hooded black robe. Was it carrying some kind of … stick?

A doll, he supposed. But how was it moving on its own?

He watched the game end. Gretl was the victor by a single step; Marta was still getting hung up occasionally on her 8s and 9s. Whatever the case, the outcome didn’t seem to matter unduly to either of them. They pounded back across the grass to the blanket, chattering like squirrels, and all but threw themselves into Fräulein Susan’s midnight-blue lap. She produced peppermint humbugs from one of her pockets – she took one, too, he noticed – and a book from another. They settled in presently to listen to her read, cuddled up on either side, cheeks puffed out from the candies, eyes already drooping. 

Bright head, dark head, lovely woman between them. Georg watched them for a long time, tight in the throat.

Impossible not to compare her to Agathe, though there was nothing maternal about her demeanor. It wasn’t her warmth that his children were so drawn to, Georg thought, for she wasn’t particularly warm with them. And yet – they flocked to her, hung on her every word, tried with every breath to please her, slept like tired kittens on her skirts.

Calm, he thought. We are in a world on the brink of whirling away to disaster, and in the midst of chaos, this woman is absolutely sure of herself and utterly, completely confident. If I were six years old, I would run to her too and put my head on her lap. Heaven help me, I am so lost in my soul that I am tempted to do it now.

She came to the end of a paragraph, brushed the wayward curl from her cheek, turned the page. The sun shone, the bees buzzed, the flowers drifted their intoxicating liquors into the still air. His daughters shifted and murmured in their sleep.

Georg held the picture in his mind for one more moment, then turned around and went back into the maze.

**


	10. The Party

CHAPTER TEN: THE PARTY

Louisa’s hand was in the air. Again.

“Yes?” said Susan.

“Fräulein Susan, I’m done with my maths.”

“Are you, now,” said Susan, and leaned over to peruse the page of two-column proofs. “Your penmanship is atrocious,” she said. “Even if you’re correct, there’s no way that Friedrich’s going to be able to read this to check your work.” She cast her eyes in the other direction to look at Friedrich’s page. “His is neater,” she said. “You won’t have an issue with it. But he’s just under half done. So there’s plenty of time for you to go back through, check that you’re not skipping steps, make sure you find _all the pairs_ of congruent triangles, and amend that chicken scratch into legible numbers.”

“But Fräulein—“

“It’s ten o’ clock in the morning,” said Susan, unforgiving. “You may be in a hurry, but the day is not. I said a half day of classes today, and I meant it; we will finish at twelve-thirty and not a minute before. Now—“ she fixed Louisa with a steely glare— “back to work.”

“Fräulein Kilda said girls didn’t need to learn geometry,” mumbled Louisa. “I liked her better. I wish I’d never put her wig in the chandelier.”

“Now, please,” said Susan, smiling like a shark. Louisa gulped and turned her pencil around to the eraser end.

There’s always one, thought Susan. 

To be fair, there wasn’t much education happening elsewhere in the schoolroom, either. Friedrich was dawdling over his own sheet of proofs, Brigitta was ostensibly reading a chapter in her grammar book but hadn’t turned a page for ten minutes, Liesl’s pencil was industriously moving but Susan bet a month of Binky’s hay budget that if she went over there right now she’d see mostly hearts and flowers in the notebook, and Kurt was staring out the window with his mouth open. Only the little girls were on task, over in the corner with crayons and paste. Write as many equations as you can think of with a solution of five, Susan had told them, giving them a stack of paper strips, and then make a daisy chain with them. No duplications, please.

Once the chain was long enough to reach the door, they were free to go. They were about halfway there, but were slowing themselves down by getting up to check the length every time they added a new link. Both of them were sticky to the wrist.

She would have been tempted to give them the morning off – it was Friday, after all, and the long-awaited ball was tonight – but Frau Schmidt had begged her to keep them busy for just one more morning, while the ballroom floor was waxed and the flower arrangements were finished. 

“And if that’s not enough to contend with, miss,” she’d said, “that Baroness has one last fitting with the seamstress at eleven o’ clock, and I don’t mind telling _you_ that if that dress gets so much as a wrinkle, then heads will roll and the first two will be yours and mine.” She gave Susan a meaningful look. “After what happened to the last one, I mean.”

“It is unfortunate that we happened to be studying aerodynamics just on that very day,” agreed Susan blandly. “I suppose it’s only natural that the boys should have gone looking for parachute silk as a supplement to the lesson.”

Frau Schmidt bit back a grin. 

“You ask me, miss,” she said, “it’s no more or less than she deserves.”

Susan, who quite agreed, raised an eyebrow. “Oh?”

“She may be pretty enough to look at,” said Frau Schmidt darkly. “But if you’d ever met the Captain’s first wife, God rest her, you’d know that that Elsa creature isn’t fit to shine her shoes.”

**

Twelve-thirty arrived, and with it, Frau Schmidt at the schoolroom door. She corralled the protesting children and banished them to their bedrooms, where luncheon was served to them on trays. Susan, at loose ends for the afternoon, sat on her bed with the doors of her wardrobe open and surveyed her own party-dress options.

As the governess, she should probably stick to the grey wool. It was unimpeachably correct, grey wool. Don’t look at me, it said, I’m not really here. Ignore the shape I contain, these swells, these divots, this pale gleaming violoncello of flesh. Inside my confines, that body sublimates into pure Function, unassailable Authority.

Susan’s eyes slid away from the grey wool toward the aubergine taffeta dinner dress in the corner of the wardrobe. Light from the window caught the edges of it: violet-black in its creases, highlighted with ridges of glowing garnet, simply cut, its only ornament the deep, subtly transgressive color of the fabric. Under the chandeliers in the ballroom, it would move in the candlelight like a gently rustling river of ruby and amethyst.

No, she thought. Not an option.

She’d worn it without a thought on her first evening in this house. But things were different now. He looked at her differently. She could feel herself tempted to look back. And that, of course, was impossible, even if he’d softened in the past several weeks from petty autocrat to passable human being.

Not that there was a rule against Roundworld men. Not per se. But you just knew it was a bad idea, if you had two brain cells left to rub against each other.

Time passed, so gently that she stopped hearing the tick of the clock in her otherwise silent room.

It really was very beautiful.

She took the violet dress out of the wardrobe and hung it in the sunlight. A breath, a gathering in of warmth; she passed her hand over the skirt and willed the wrinkles to smooth themselves away.

What a parachute it would make, she thought, and shook her head at her own folly. 

At this rate, she was going to need one.

**

Eight o’ clock. The children had been provided with a substantial cream tea – salad sandwiches, frosting on the cakes – and were now surfing a giddy wave of sugar, caffeine and routine disruption. For a while, they had been racing back and forth from the back lawn to the front, breathlessly watching the guests arrive. Now that the dancing had started in earnest, they were glued to the French doors leading off the ballroom onto the back terrace.

“The women look so beautiful,” said Brigitta, eyes shining with reflected candlelight. “It’s like fairy gardens. Like they don’t have feet.”

“I think the _men_ are beautiful,” said Gretl. Her siblings laughed.

“How would you know?” Liesl said sharply, then softened when Gretl’s chin trembled. “No, no, I’m sorry, _Liebchen,_ I didn’t mean it like that. Of course they’re beautiful.”

“ _Someone’s_ in a bad mood,” said Friedrich archly. “Perhaps you should dance it off.”

“Are you offering?” Liesl said. “Because I would be delighted to accept, young man.”

They were both feeling themselves a bit: Friedrich in his first pair of pants that didn’t show his knees, and Liesl in skirts that just brushed her ankles, if she slouched a bit when she sat. They executed a passable, if slightly stiff, box step around the perimeter of the terrace, applauded by their siblings, and collapsed onto the stone ledge next to the flower boxes. Such an odd mix of child and adult they were, at this age, thought Susan: proud of the clothes in one moment, heedless of them the next.

“The music’s changed,” said Marta, turning back toward the ballroom. “It’s still one-two-three, Fräulein, but it doesn’t sound like a waltz anymore.”

Susan was prepared for this; Agnes had recommended some reading. “You are quite correct,” she said. “The waltz’s primary musical emphasis falls on the first beat, DAH-dee-dee. This is the ländler, an Austrian folk dance, in which the primary emphasis falls on the second beat. You can hear it: deedle-DAH-deedle deedle-DAH-dah.”

“It’s a more interesting dance,” said Kurt, perking up. “Not just round and round in circles. It has steps that change.”

“Indeed.”

“Do you know them?”

“In theory,” said Susan cautiously. Dancing to music was much easier than creating it yourself; you merely placed your feet according to the diagrams and followed the mathematics inherent in the beat structure. 

And she _had_ read the book. 

“You bow,” she said, giving in and holding out a hand to him, “and I curtsy. Like so, yes. And then we go for a walk.”

It should have worked according to the steps in the book, but Kurt was a full foot shorter than she was, and the isometric ratios were off. She was about to call a halt to the experiment when she felt a tap on her shoulder.

“It’s important to have an equal partner,” said the Captain, “so the lady doesn’t have to overreach. Do allow me, won’t you, Kurt?”

**

He’d only come out for some air.

The crowds, the smell of burning beeswax and too many hothouse flowers and a hundred different women drenched in a hundred different perfumes, the constant scraping of the violins: he expected this in Vienna, but it felt wrong here. And then there was the confrontation with Zeller over the issue of the flag. Expected, but no less upsetting for that.

He stepped into the shadow between a drapery and an enormous flower arrangement, looked out onto the dimly lit terrace, and saw his oldest son and oldest daughter twirling their way over the stone tiles. How tall Friedrich was, he thought, how graceful Liesl, like this wasn’t her first dance at all, though of course it was, how could it not be. Her coloring was his, not Agathe’s, but in the soft light with her face upturned and caught just so, she looked so like her mother that it made his chest tight.

If I had one wish, he thought, I would take back the last five years and do them over. And then perhaps I would have some idea how she stopped being eleven and started to be sixteen.

They sat down, laughing, and turned from strangers back into his children. The waltz drew to a close with a flourish and a patter of applause, and the string orchestra launched into the ländler, a dance he had specifically requested over Elsa’s objections.

“Really, Georg,” she’d said, making a moué at him. “How provincial.”

“We are in the provinces,” he reminded her, with a smile and a tap on her nose to soften the words and make them read as playful. “This isn’t Vienna, darling. We may dance the waltz, but the ländler is ours.”

And sure enough, his friends and neighbors were taking up the old steps with smiles of nostalgia. Georg found himself glad of that, though the familiar music filled him with deep melancholy.

Movement again from the terrace, distracting him from his spiraling mood. He watched stout little Kurt struggle through the first steps of the dance, eyes fixed on Fräulein Susan’s face as she coached him. 

She moves beautifully, he thought. And how like a shadow she is in that dark warm color, only her hands and face and precisely placed feet catching the light. How unknowable for all her practicality, how mysterious; an Englishwoman dancing the ländler like she is born to it, giving my son this moment he will always remember.

He was out the door and pulling on his gloves before he realized his intention. And then it was too late to back out.

Only a flicker of surprise in her dark eyes over his interruption, and then she flowed easily into the steps, spinning out and away and back with her white arm in a graceful arch. No more flowers, no more dizzying perfume, music quieted to a murmur, eyes soothed by the easy comforting half-light. 

Georg had danced this dance since he was as short and chubby as Kurt, gloves slightly too big, a pink-faced pigtailed girl in a white frilly dress as his partner. Her name had been Klara. She was married now to a manufacturer of industrial magnets, living in Hamburg with four children.

And he had danced this dance with a hundred other Austrian girls since, including his own wife. The intricacy of the steps, the unforgiving order in which they had to be memorized, the inherent athleticism of it: all that usually led to laughter and teasing. It was lighthearted, this dance; your partner touched you hardly at all, and against the scandalous, close-clutched waltz it seemed unbearably innocent.

Innocent, that is, until you danced it on a darkened terrace with an unsmiling, intent-eyed woman who moved like smoke in your arms and gleamed like opal under the diffuse, distant light and never put a foot wrong, so that every time you reached her hand was already there waiting. Under these circumstances the ländler was unbearable seduction, thought Georg; your hand in its glove brushes hers and then she is gone again, to circle, to pivot, to come back but not to hold. Even face to face your crossed arms are between you, _passé_ to the side, _passé_ back. Your breath mingles with hers, you hear her dress rustle, your eyes lock; she is within the circle of your arms but you are helpless to keep her there. She is destined to back away, and you must let her go even though the print of a hand glows like a rose-shade lantern on her cheek and you know each other well enough by now to be absolutely certain that it is not anger, but yearning, that lights that flame.

“Your face is all red, Fräulein,” observed Brigitta. Susan nodded, swallowing.

“Indeed,” she said, stepping back another pace. Only the first syllable betrayed any semblance of a wobble, Georg noticed. Her control was, as ever, impressive. “Aerobic activity such as vigorous dancing will raise the heart rate and cause the blood to move more quickly through the veins. This is very healthful, though it does – if one is pale – cause a hectic flush.”

“How lovely,” said Elsa from behind them, with a little patter of applause. Georg turned to look at her, regal as a calla lily, swathed in silver and gold tulle and glittering like a goddess down from Olympus. “What a beautiful couple you make.”

What now? Georg thought.

“Ah,” he began. Susan cut him off.

“The children would like to say goodnight,” she said, very carefully not looking at him. “After their performance, we will leave you to the rest of your festivities.”

He nodded. Was he more disappointed, or more relieved? It was impossible to say.

“Right,” he said, and took Elsa’s arm to lead her back into the ballroom. “Of course.”


	11. Dinner

CHAPTER ELEVEN: DINNER

**

The children’s farewell was everything they had been teasing it to be. Georg found himself both amused and rather moved by it. They really did sing rather well; Fräulein might protest all she liked about not being a musician, but whatever she was doing with them was working, she couldn’t deny that. And from their reactions, his old friends and neighbors had genuinely enjoyed it – though perhaps that had less to do with the actual musical product and more to do with the general social renaissance of his household.

Agathe had liked parties and found excuses to throw a lot of them. Everyone had missed them, thought Georg, and resolved to open the ballroom more often in the future.

They were crowding in to dinner now, and he was momentarily separated from Elsa by a chattering group of elderly ladies: _such talented children, such delightful entertainment, how much Liesl resembles her poor mother, how sweet she looked carrying the little one, how proud you must be!_ He smiled at them and murmured something polite, and saw Elsa roll her eyes at him over their heads. 

She was putting on a good face, thought Georg, but she wasn’t happy with him. He supposed that he couldn’t blame her.

The dance orchestra downshifted into dinner music. Max threaded his way through the line of old women, all wild eyes and twitching moustache. He had Fräulein Susan by the arm.

“Georg, you’re not going to let this girl get away,” he said. “She must have dinner with us!”

“Max,” murmured Elsa.

“This is business, Elsa,” he hissed, and turned back to Georg. “Well?”

Business, thought Georg. He meant that nonsense about the music festival. Well, he could rant about that as much as he liked; it wasn’t going to get him anywhere. “You can if you like, Fräulein,” he said, trying to sound indifferent, and felt Elsa’s arm tense next to his.

“The poor girl’s all disheveled, Georg,” she said, lips curved sweetly. “She’s been dealing with your tribe of Hottentots all night; she must be exhausted. What kind of employer would you be to lengthen her workday?”

Fräulein Susan’s eyebrow twitched a millimeter northward at this bit of bald-faced malice. “I could use a moment to refresh myself,” she agreed blandly.

“We’ll wait for you,” said Georg, and heard Elsa’s angry drawn-in breath. A line in the sand, for sure, he thought. But one really shouldn’t reward open incivility. Or unfounded jealousy, for that matter.

Flashback to the dance on the dark terrace, to the heat of her rising to his hands through the fine fabric of her gown, to that startled moment of mutual epiphany at the end. _Unfounded, eh?_ mused his conscience, and laughed when he flinched.

His hand found Elsa’s and squeezed it in mute apology. She shook herself free of his touch.

“You shall be my dinner partner, Fräulein,” said a satisfied Max. “We must discuss your triumph at length, and decide how best to capitalize upon it.” He watched her purple-taffeta back recede toward the main hall. “What a jewel that girl is,” he said, shaking his pomaded head. “Wherever did you find her, Georg?”

“Excuse me, darling,” said Elsa through her teeth. “I think I need some air. It’s very close in this room.”

**

The main hall was crowded, so Susan slipped through the side door into the servants’ quarters that led to the back staircase. _Exhausted,_ she thought, lip curling slightly, and felt in her pocket for a hairpin. _I’ll show her ‘exhausted’._

There was a mirror in the upstairs corridor. She paused in front of it to capture the wayward streak of silver hair and smooth it back into her French twist. There, she thought, satisfied. Nice and neat, and running up the stairs had put a hint of flush in her cheeks. No need even to go farther down the hall to her room.

She was about to retrace her path down the back stairs when she heard a noise from behind the closed library doors.

Odd, that. No one should be in the library at this hour; the guests were filing into dinner, the servants were preparing and serving it, and the children were being hustled out of their party clothes and into bed. She would be very surprised if the little ones weren’t already asleep – Gretl had not needed to feign exhaustion for her verse of the song. Excitement led to adrenaline, and adrenaline went away fast and all at once, once you didn’t need it any more.

An amorous couple, perhaps, she thought; no need to intervene there. And then she heard a desk drawer open and close.

She rematerialized herself into a deep shadow behind the draperies at one of the windows and watched the intruder flick through a stack of papers. He was fair-haired going to gray and in his early sixties. She’d noticed him earlier, glowering at the big Austrian flag hanging in the reception hall.

“Interesting,” she said without showing herself. “Does everyone come to a dinner party armed with a flashlight and a lock pick? Because I know for a fact that that desk is kept locked at all times.”

He startled, but only barely. Military training, she guessed. “Who’s there?” he asked, even-voiced. “Who are you and what do you want?”

“I’ll ask the questions, thank you,” said Susan. “Why are you going through Captain von Trapp’s private correspondence?”

His eyes flickered and his right hand dropped out of sight behind the desk. Susan sighed. So predictable, these humans, with their dangerous little toys. 

STOP THAT, she said, wincing a little at the feel of the old power flowing through her; it always made her a little light-headed when she hadn’t used it for a while. GOOD. NOW PUT IT DOWN ON THE DESK.

The fair-haired man obeyed, his face blank and sagging. The beam of his flashlight caught the shape of the pistol and projected it onto the far wall of the library. Its menacing shadow hung there like a giant bat. 

Susan picked up the flashlight and flicked it off. The darkness wouldn’t hinder her in her purpose, and it would disorient him.

TELL ME WHO YOU ARE.

He grimaced. Impressive, thought Susan, that he was trying to fight her. You saw that in the very religious, sometimes. Zealotry gave people unusual powers of will that they didn’t possess on their own.

“Zeller,” he said. “NDSAP 12443, SS 325.” 

ARE THOSE YOUR MILITARY IDENTIFIERS?

“Yes.”

WHAT DO YOU WANT WITH CAPTAIN VON TRAPP?

“The Party wants von Trapp on board,” said Zeller, “and he’s well-known to have nationalist Austrian sympathies. I’m tasked with finding something on him that we can use as a lever. It’s far more of a coup for the Party if he joins of his own free will.”

AND HAVE YOU FOUND ANYTHING?

He glared at her as though he could actually see her in the darkness. “No,” he said after a moment of internal struggle. “The man’s careful with his papers, damn him. There’s nothing here to incriminate him or those we suspect are feeding him information.”

Susan considered this. TELL ME WHAT YOU PLAN TO DO NEXT, she said, and saw Zeller grit his teeth.

“He’s a family man,” he said. “That’s lever enough, if we don’t find anything else.”

Silence fell in the library, broken only by the sweet distant sound of the string orchestra from downstairs. He was trembling as though in the grip of a fever, trying to fight her hold on him. She was thinking of the seven sleeping children at the end of the corridor.

His fingers twitched. Now or never, thought Susan, and covered his hand with hers. A faint terrible whine slid from between his clenched teeth.

YOU DON’T REMEMBER WHY YOU’RE HERE, said Susan, leaning so close to him that their foreheads almost touched. YOU DON’T KNOW WHY YOU CAME. REPEAT THAT.

His breath came in short wheezing spasms. “Don’t … remember,” he panted.

YOU FEEL TERRIBLY ILL, said Susan, merciless. YOU ATE SOMETHING THAT DID NOT AGREE WITH YOU AND YOUR BODY IS REBELLING AGAINST IT. YOU MUST GO HOME AT ONCE AND TAKE BICARBONATE.

It was working, she thought; his skin instantly went clammy and his red face turned chalky and sallow. “Have … to go home,” he agreed.

IF YOU COME BACK TO THIS HOUSE YOU WILL BE ILL AGAIN.

“Won’t … come … back.”

DON’T STOP TO SAY GOODBYE, said Susan. JUST … GO NOW.

She let go of his hand and watched him stumble to the door. His footsteps faded away down the hall. A door slammed.

She picked up the pistol and thought a different shape at it. It turned warm and malleable in her hand. She put it down on the desk, where it clinked as it cooled.

Well, that put a cap on it, she thought, heading for the door. Time to get some real answers and find out what exactly she was dealing with.

**

The Baroness came into her room, beautiful face set and angry, and blinked to find Susan dressed in gunmetal gray and putting a pair of shoes into a full carpet bag. There was a muffled SQUEAK as the shoes descended and Susan zipped the bag closed.

“My dear Duchess,” she began, and Susan stopped her with an upraised hand.

“Not now,” she said. “I haven’t any time to lose.”

“I’m afraid I really don’t understand.”

“I have to go,” said Susan. “Kindly do not burden the Captain with news of my departure until tomorrow morning.”

The blue eyes flickered as the Baroness recalculated her position. “Of course, my dear,” she said, after a moment. “I wouldn’t dream of it. And will you be — returning?”

“If and when I do,” said Susan, “things will be different.”

She picked up the bag, shut the door behind her, and blinked out of the villa onto the front lawn. 

“Something’s about to happen,” said the raven. “You’ve got that look about you. Where are we going?”

Susan didn’t answer him.

BINKY, she said to the night sky, and smiled at the white horse who came cantering toward her. TAKE ME HOME.

An instant later, the lawn was empty.

**


	12. Here And Gone

CHAPTER TWELVE: HERE AND GONE

**

The villa was in chaos. Georg hated chaos.

“I really don’t understand,” he said for the seventh time, “why you didn’t come and find me at once.”

Elsa rolled her eyes.

“It’s quite simple, darling,” she said, waving one languid hand in the direction of the front drive. “She was adamant that you should not know until all the dinner guests had left; she asked me to deliver the news at breakfast the next morning. It seemed a reasonable enough request.”

“To you, perhaps,” Georg said sharply. “I have no doubt that her departure served your personal ends admirably. What it means to this household is quite something else.”

“That sounds remarkably like an admission to me,” said Elsa, her blue gaze cooling. “And after all the trouble you went through to convince me that you had no interest in dallying with the help.”

Unable to sit still another moment, Georg pushed back his chair. “Believe what you like,” he said from between gritted teeth, “but there was never any dalliance, not the slightest hint of one. Fräulein Susan is not the sort of woman with whom one … dallies. And I would hardly refer to her as the ‘help’ – though it does occur to me that we could sorely use some at the moment.”

As if to prove his point, Frau Schmidt appeared in the doorway, kindly round face white with worry. Georg raised his eyebrows in mute question, and she shook her head.

“Franz has gone out with the car,” she said, “and all the neighbours have been telephoned. But there is no sign of them. Not so much as a footprint.”

“The canoe is still in the boathouse,” said Georg to himself, pacing. “The bicycles are in the shed.” He spun. “The train station.”

“Franz rang them,” said Frau Schmidt, “the very first thing. No one has seen them anywhere in town.”

“It isn’t as if there is anything around here to harm them,” said Elsa, _sotto voce._ “Goodness knows they’ve been romping through the countryside like vagrants for the past six weeks, all day every day, and they always manage to make it back in time for luncheon. You could just stop spinning your tyres and wait for them to come back on their own.” She fielded Georg’s furious look with a cool one of her own. “Or – not.”

“I’m going out to look in the maze again,” said Georg, seething. “You can do as you please; you’re generally good at that.”

“Tell me, darling,” Elsa said, sipping her tea. “Who is it exactly that you’re so worried about? The children whose welfare you’ve farmed out to hirelings for the past five years? Or their winsome, wayward keeper?”

**

The maze was, of course, deserted. Georg sat down on one of the sundial benches in the center, heedless of the singing birds and the sunshine, and tried to swallow the knot of worry in his throat.

Being children, they had left mementoes of their passing in the maze, which he had picked up and collected as he worked his way toward the center: Louisa’s headscarf, one of Kurt’s toy soldiers, a tiny wooden box that, when opened, held a ring of braided horsehair. He took this out now and worried it between his fingers. It was pure white, which was curious; Schneeglocke was the only gray in the villa’s stable, and his tail hairs were tinged with charcoal at their ends.

More wizardry, he supposed. Fräulein Susan was the kind of woman who would whiten horsehair to please a little girl, and then claim she was doing it for educational reasons instead of personal ones. He could see them all now with tied-back hair and safety goggles, clustering around a Bunsen burner while she lectured them about the chemical properties of hydrogen peroxide.

Hardly realizing what he was doing, he slid the ring onto the smallest finger of his left hand, where it fit snugly.

They had gone to find her, of course. No other explanation sufficed. And he couldn’t say that he blamed them; her advent into the household had changed everything for them.

Where had she gone? And why?

He drew from his jacket pocket one of the only real clues the house had given up, a heavy round lump of metal that Frau Schmidt had found on his desk a few mornings ago. It fit into the palm of his hand and was perfectly spherical except for one side, which was flat and embossed with faint lines that looked like wood grain; if he didn’t know better, he would be tempted to think that it had been forged there in the room and then left to cool on the desk. The feel of the metal was familiar to him in a vaguely troubling way — slippery, almost as if oiled, and smelling of carbon and … fireworks? He sniffed it again, studied it for a few minutes, then rewrapped it in his handkerchief and put it back in his pocket.

The other clue had also been found in the office: all of the curtains had been tied back in their customary regimented places, except for the one nearest the desk. That one was hanging loose the morning after Fräulein’s departure, hiding the window seat behind it by a bit more than half, its tasseled silk tie cut and discarded on the floor.

“She left for a reason,” he said out loud, “which must mean that she will come back.” To counter that optimistic statement, his brain supplied the other possible reason for her precipitous disappearance: their dance on the terrace, the glow of pink on her cheek, Elsa’s hard eyes as she cut her way through the crush of partygoers toward the staircase.

From the top of the hedge, a derisive _quork:_ Georg looked up into the beady, assessing gaze of the giant raven. “You,” he said, vaulting to his feet. “Where are the children? Where is Fräulein?”

 _Quork,_ said the insolent raven again, and pushed off in a shiny black flap of feathers.

**

Elsa was right: they were back by dinner time, bright heads drooping as they filed over the back lawn toward the villa. Georg, light-headed with mingled relief and rage, met them on the steps of the terrace. As if from a great distance, he heard himself demand an explanation for their disappearance. They looked at each other.

“We were berry picking, Father,” said Liesl presently. Georg gritted his teeth. _Don’t you lie to me with your mother’s eyes, little girl,_ he thought.

“Berries,” he said, infusing the word with doubt. They nodded eagerly. Miscreants, the lot of them. “What kind of berries?”

“Blueberries,” said Kurt.

“Blackberries,” said Friedrich.

They exchanged glances.

“Blueberries,” they said in unison.

“It’s far too early for blueberries,” said Georg. “They’re green on the bushes; they won’t be ripe for another month. And you’re coming from the wrong direction to have been out picking them.”

Louisa – by far the most experienced and skillful dissembler of them all – shouldered her way toward the front of the pack.

“Boys,” she said with contempt. “What do they know what kind of berries we picked? All they’re good for is eating them.”

“So – what kind of berries?” said Georg, with morbid fascination.

“Strawberries, of course,” said Louisa. “It’s just been very cool weather, as you know, Father. So they were more blue than red.”

“And of course you didn’t bring any back with you,” said Georg. They all shook their heads. “And you don’t have baskets. And your tongues aren’t even a little bit blue.” More head-shaking.

“Brigitta,” he said, merciless. If there was a weak link in the chain of sociopathy he’d fathered, surely it was this guileless, soft-eyed child. “You’re going to tell me the truth, aren’t you?”

She gulped, but held firm. “There were berries,” she said. “Truly, Father, there were. But they weren’t blue and they weren’t red. They weren’t – any color.”

“They tasted good, though,” said Gretl at her side. “We picked and picked them. The old man helped us.”

“The old man?” Georg said, and saw Kurt’s elbow connect with Gretl’s ribs.

“Shh!”

“I don’t see why it’s a secret,” Gretl said, unbowed. “We didn’t do anything wrong. We just went and asked, that’s all, and the old man wouldn’t let us in. But we did pet the kitties and feed the skeleton fishes and swing on the swing.” She glared at her siblings, mutinous. “It goes right through the tree like the tree isn’t even there. So you don’t hit your head.”

Skeleton fishes? thought Georg, caught off balance, and shook his head to clear it.

“Well,” he said, gathering the tattered cloak of his authority around him, “clearly you’ve stuffed yourself with snacks all afternoon, so eating anything else on top of all that will have the whole house up tonight dealing with your indigestion. I’ll tell Frau Schmidt to send your dinners back to the kitchen.”

He turned on his heel, darkly amused by the stifled moans of dismay behind him. “If anyone decides they’re hungry enough to tell me the truth,” he said over his shoulder, “I’ll be in my study. Otherwise, I shall see all of you in the morning.”

**

Susan sat in the Great Hall, watching the scythe in the tall thin clock swing back and forth in its clean, deadly parabola. After so much time spent in the blue-and-gold prettiness of the Alps and the scrubbed, sunny villa, her grandfather’s domain should have seemed unbearably gloomy. She’d never seen it that way, of course; however it looked to outside eyes, to her it was simply home.

A flicker of deeper darkness in the doorway; the glint of dim light on white bone.

THEY’VE GONE. 

“Oh?”

ALBERT WANTED TO MAKE THEM SANDWICHES FOR THE TRIP. I THOUGHT IT UNWISE.

“I’m sure Binky will get them back in time for dinner,” Susan said mechanically. She could feel the blue pinpricks of light in his eye sockets scanning her face.

VERY ENTERPRISING OF THE LITTLE DARK-HAIRED ONE TO THINK OF SUMMONING HIM.

“She’s at that age where she’s horse-crazy,” Susan said. “If her father knew her better, he’d get her a pony of her own.” She felt her right hand knot into a fist inside her pocket. “I have questions.”

I ASSUMED AS MUCH.

She whirled to face him. “Were you ever going to tell me what was at stake? Why send me there to begin with? What am I supposed to accomplish while I’m with them? Why is it so important to – to _us_ — that the Roundworld war turn out one way or another?”

The expression on the polished, grinning skull didn’t change, but even so, Susan got the feeling that it was slightly abashed. WHEN ONE WORLD FALLS, THE OTHERS TREMBLE, he said finally. I MERELY THOUGHT TO HELP MAINTAIN — BALANCE.

“Hah,” said Susan. “You sent me there to put a finger on the scales, that’s what.”

YOU DO SEEM TO LIKE TO GET … INVOLVED. I SUPPOSE IT RUNS IN THE FAMILY.

“It goes without saying that I like the children,” said Susan tartly. “They’re children, aren’t they? And I’m a teacher.” She glared at him. “And you can stop looking at me like that! I know perfectly well that — that anything else is a bad idea.”

He took the chair opposite hers. IS ANY IDEA BAD?

She ignored this piece of deliberate provocation. “Well, whatever you wanted me to do, I’ve already started it,” she said. “That nasty little man from the Austrian Nazi Party left without his gun; the only shots he’ll be firing for the next week are … well, never mind. But that can’t possibly be the end of it.”

IF YOU SAY SO.

“Granddad!” She hated it when he did this – she was immediately sixteen years old again, all raised voice and hackles. “I didn’t come to complain about the assignment,” she said, more quietly. “I want to help. I just would be able to do that more efficiently if I had more information.”

Silence. IT COULD GO EITHER WAY, he said finally. ONE OF THE WAYS IS MUCH BETTER, FOR ROUNDWORLD AND THE DISC AND ALL THE OTHER WORLDS IN BETWEEN. THE MAN IS AN IMPORTANT PIECE OF THE PUZZLE. BEYOND THAT, NOT MUCH IS CLEAR.

“So,” Susan said, “I’m to guard him, then.”

HE WILL FIGHT FOR ONE SIDE OR THE OTHER. WHICH SIDE DEPENDS ENTIRELY ON WHERE HE IS AT THE TIME.

“I’m not sure what you’re saying,” said Susan, and despite herself, shivered as the blue-flame gaze passed over her.

ALL I KNOW FOR SURE IS, her grandfather said, YOU’RE GOING TO HAVE TO CLIMB A MOUNTAIN.

**


	13. The Return

CHAPTER THIRTEEN: THE RETURN

**

Time moved differently outside the Disc, so she took advantage of the afternoon and went to Biers. 

Only Angua and Sally were at their usual table. They looked up as she walked in and waved. By the time Susan had ordered her drink, they were immersed in their conversation again.

“ … either one of them, frankly.”

“What’s in it for her? One’s hairy, one’s sparkly, and they could both bleed her out in under ten minutes.”

“If it were me, I’d tell them both to pound sand, then move two towns over and start up a bookstore. One with a café and an open mic night.”

“Ooh. I _love_ those.”

Susan sat down. “Igor has gin and tonic on the specials board,” she said. “What kind of sick game is he playing now? Is it hair tonic?”

“Neither of us were brave enough,” said Angua. “The table next to ours got one and it was green.”

Susan considered this. “What kind of green?”

“The wrong kind,” said Angua firmly. “Trust me.” She shoved a wooden bowl in Susan’s direction. “We are a fan of the bar snacks, though. He started that up two weeks ago, to draw in the happy-hour crowd.”

Susan picked one up, sniffed it, shrugged, and bit down. “Not bad,” she said after a moment. Sally grinned and snagged the bowl back to her side of the table.

“Exactly,” she said. “You’ve got your salt, your grease, your sugar, and your crunch. Not sure what it is we’re crunching, but you can’t have everything then, can you. How is Captain Morgan?”

“In mortal danger, apparently,” said Susan. “And yet, here I sit.”

“A day off is a day off.”

“I was a little in over my head, I thought. So I went to see Granddad.”

Four raised eyebrows: two sleek, two bushy. “Oh?”

“You know how he is,” said Susan, selecting another crunchie. “The usual ominous, vague portents. Enough to frighten the undiscerning, nothing truly useful. I decided I could stand a drink.”

“I’ll drink to that,” said Angua, raising her pint. “And how about Roundworld, then? Is it still on the verge of political collapse?”

“Does Foul Ole Ron say ‘bugrit’? Ah, thank you, Igor.” Susan tipped back the glass he handed her — it was, in fact, a pale sickly green, bubbling gently in a way that suggested not carbonation so much as a partially clogged drain — and downed half of it. 

“Yes,” she said after a moment’s contemplation of the depths of the second half. “I’m afraid it is, actually.”

“It’s not _just_ that,” Sally said after a moment. “You deal with one world or another threatening to end every other fortnight, and you don’t come in and slam down an Igor board special all willy-nilly and reckless.” She put down her own glass, sloshing slightly, and pointed at Susan. “This is about the man, isn’t it?”

Susan hesitated. “Well,” she said — seeing Girl Talk advancing from a close distance and resigned to at least having to say hello— “I left at an odd moment. The motivations behind my return could be … misinterpreted.”

They leaned in closer, their predators’ eyes taking on an avid gleam.

“Misinterpreted, my Great-Aunt Detentia,” said Sally. “You’ve been up to something — I knew it! Drink the rest of that — that thing” — she made an imperious gesture toward the gin and tonic — “and then tell us everything … every teensy-weensy, intimate, disgusting detail.”

“What then?” said Susan. 

Sally and Angua grinned at each other.

“We’ll tell you what to do, of course,” said Sally. “You can’t go back there without a game plan, after all.”

“Absolutely not,” said Angua. “Besides”—she managed a wistful look, then ruined it by smirking —“those of us in committed relationships still like to experience a bit of romantic tension. From a safe distance, of course.”

Susan sighed. It wasn’t as if anyone else was lining up to give her advice.

“Fair enough,” she said, and emptied the glass.

**

He knew she had returned from the clamor rising off the back lawn; it was too spontaneous and happy to possibly mean anything else. Forsaking Elsa and Max at the bezique table, he pushed back his chair without a word and went out onto the terrace, still holding his winning hand of cards. 

There she was, half-buried in the children clinging limpet-like to her, silver-streaked and unsmiling in a grey-blue dress he hadn’t seen before. Like fog at twilight, he thought, and would have vaulted down the terrace steps to meet her if his pride hadn’t stopped him at the railing.

“Look, Georg, isn’t it wonderful,” murmured Elsa behind him. “The little shepherdess is back with her lambs. Just in time for dinner, too.” She raised her voice to pitch over the general hubbub. “Fräulein Susan – how marvelous to see you safely returned. And _just_ as Georg was about to drag the lake.” 

“Elsa,” murmured Georg. She studied his face for a moment, gave him a thin-lipped smile, and turned. 

“I shall alert Max,” she said over her shoulder. “And also the men with the brandy and the St. Bernards. Consider it my good deed for the day.”

“Dinner,” Georg said to the children, who shrieked with delight and surprise and leaped up the stairs toward the terrace doors like salmon on their way to spawn. He let them flow past him, only half-noticing how their noise went with them — a bit at a time, until the doors closed behind them and shut it off abruptly. 

They stood in silence, on the manicured edge of an ancient wilderness, and looked at each other.

“You went away without saying goodbye,” he said. “Not even to the children.”

“It was wrong of me,” said Susan. “Forgive me.” She looked rueful. “I am a solitary kind of person,” she said. “It does not always occur to me that my actions have an effect on others, beyond their pure logistics.”

“Why did you?” Georg asked. Susan shook her head and turned to look out over the lake.

“It’s too deep to drag, you know,” she said. “Such a placid surface, and so much beneath it. You would not want to know what lives in those depths.”

He conceded her point with a tilt of his chin. “Are you back to stay?” he asked, and was surprised at how the question wanted to stick in his throat. The answer seemed unbearably important.

“For a while, anyway,” said Susan, and with a last long look, brushed past him to ascend the steps into the house. “Until what needs doing has been done. After that, we will … reevaluate.”

**

The children ate like coal miners who had been trapped underground for three days. Then they were boisterous for thirty minutes. Finally they collapsed, nearly in unison, from a surfeit of Wiener schnitzel and relief, and were shooed into their beds by Frau Schmidt.

Max settled himself in an arm-chair with a Raymond Chandler novel in translation that he’d filched from Franz, a tumbler of Georg’s 40-year Glenfiddich, and a cigar. Georg caught Elsa’s meaningful gaze and held the terrace door open for her.

“Nightcap, darling?” he asked. She rolled her eyes sideways at him.

“Let us not pretend any longer, just between us, I beg of you,” she said. Georg blinked.

“Pretend?” he repeated. Inwardly he was wincing. So it was to be _that_ conversation. Well, he couldn’t say that he hadn’t seen it coming.

“Please, darling,” said Elsa. “It’s very clear to me that I have been outranked, and must graciously withdraw.”

“Rank has nothing to do with it,” said Georg, surprised, then bit his lip ruefully at her bitter little laugh. 

“Ah,” he said, sinking into a chair. “So that was a test. I assume that I have failed it.”

“You are not the man for me, it is true,” she said. “Far too independent.” She laughed her Viennese laugh, a tinkling brittle chime that he’d once found impossibly alluring. “I want a man that needs me desperately. Or, barring that, at least needs my money desperately.”

She was near enough to Georg that he could take her hand in his and squeeze it. “Don’t sell yourself short, Elsa,” he said. “You are brilliant at business, a delight to the senses, and the wittiest conversationalist I know, and beneath all the glitter I choose to believe that you’re genuinely good-hearted.”

“Dear me, how dull you make me sound.”

He ignored this. “It’s neither your fault nor mine,” he said, “that you’re bored by my country friends and generally horrified at the thought of interacting with my children. Even if there were no other … variables … this would never have worked out.”

“If the new English governess had been a boiled potato like all the others, you mean?” Elsa said. “Perhaps. And yet, she has come back to you.” She tugged her hand free of his and gestured toward the stand of old trees sheltering the glass summerhouse. 

“You are a moth, Georg,” she said, her lovely profile pensive. “And down there, somewhere, is the flame you have been circling. I have no idea if the two of you can actually co-exist, but I do know that I’ve outstayed my welcome here.”

“Elsa,” he said, helpless. “I know I’ve been utterly unfair to you. But when two people talk of marriage —“

“No,” said Elsa fiercely, turning on him, “not another word. I’m going inside to pack my little bags and return to Vienna — which is where I belong; if this camping expedition to the country has taught me nothing else, at least I know that now.” 

She kissed his cheek. _“Auf wiedersehen,_ darling,” she said. “And ... good luck shifting Max, by the way. He’s dead set on having your troop of miniature vaudevillians perform in his folk music festival, and wild horses couldn’t drag him off your doorstep now.” Her smile was full of malice. “He really is horrendously expensive to keep around the house.”

“Oh, good,” said Georg, and was rewarded with a last silvery laugh as she swept through the doors into the villa and left him.

**


	14. The Summerhouse

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

**

What was it Sally had said? Oh yes: “The dress will do it all for you, as long as you don’t talk too much.”

“Thank you for that,” Susan had said sharply. “You’ve singlehandedly dragged me into last century in the space of thirty seconds. ‘Look pretty and simper’? Really?” She raked one hand through her hair, ignoring Angua’s yelp of dismay. “Besides,” she said. “We probably won’t even get to … to that. There’s a lot to be said.”

“Yes,” said Sally, “and no one’s telling you you can’t say it.” Her grin was quick and wicked and just a little pointier than usual. “Just say it … _after._ ”

She might have been on to something, Susan reflected now – at least about the dress, which turned her into a softly diaphanous swirl of light amid the shadows of the summerhouse. She sat down on one of the stone benches, spreading her skirts around her, and looked up toward the villa. Two people were standing on the veranda, sharply silhouetted against the candlelight glow of the French doors. Susan watched as the Baroness leaned up to kiss the Captain’s cheek. A moment later, the window of light opened and closed behind her, leaving the Captain alone with his hands steepled grimly upon the railing.

A mosquito buzzed by her ear. Susan slapped at it, missed, cursed under her breath, and sent an annoyed burst of energy outward. A tiny body hit the stone, its remains sizzling gently. She pictured the corner of her grandfather’s library of lives where the mosquito’s microscopic life-timer sat in a line with ten thousand others just like it. 

One solitary spark, winking out like a blue eye closing.

He could show up here with that teensy little scythe, to collect it. He’d done it before, when the notion took him.

Bollocks, she thought, and waited tensely, staring into the darkness.

“I thought I just might find you here,” said a voice from behind her. She fought back a flinch. Just the Captain. Not Granddad.

“Oh?”

He looked more casual than she’d seen him before – hands in his pockets, collar undone one button, smiling faintly. “May I?” he asked, gesturing toward the bench, and she scooted over wordlessly to make room. 

He dropped down next to her, facing the opposite direction. They sat in silence for more than a minute, but Susan didn’t fool herself that it would last. He was all but pulsing with curiosity and impatience.

“I want an answer from you, Fräulein,” he said, bracing his hands against the edge of the bench.

“Yes?”

He turned his head slightly to meet her eyes, shot her another quick one-sided smile, and turned away again. His face was all bones and hollows in the soft light. “Two things, actually,” he said, “two things. Two questions.”

She nodded – yes, all right – but didn’t reply. This might have been a while in the reckoning, but that didn’t mean she had to make it easier for him.

“Why did you run away?” he asked, not looking at her. “And what was it that made you come back?”

“I had an obligation to fulfill,” Susan said – a sidestep, this, to buy her time, and they both knew it. “I came back to fulfill it.”

His teeth flashed in the half-darkness. “I already know you’re clever. I was hoping you would trust me enough to also be truthful.”

“I’m trying to decide if the truth will frighten you.”

“You won’t know until you tell me what it is.”

Her words to the south, his to the north. They were looking at each other and also being careful not to. Susan could feel his shoulder a scant millimeter from hers, leaking body heat in her direction.

She made a decision.

“The night of the party,” she said, “I discovered a very unpleasant little man with a bottle-brush moustache and a red band on his arm going through the papers in your locked desk.”

The Captain’s eyes went hard. “Zeller.”

“Yes. I interrogated him and he gave me his identifying numbers – he’s highly placed in both the German military and the SS. He’s been tasked with recruiting you into the Austrian Nazi Party and is prepared to use your children as leverage to make you agree.”

He went very still. It was so quiet where they were sitting that Susan could tell he was holding his breath. “Zeller told you that?”

“I have powers of persuasion I haven’t shown to you.” Susan flicked a sideways glance in his direction. “I went away for a few days after our conversation to do – shall we say, opposition research.”

He was silent for a moment. “Your arrival here,” he said softly. “Your self-possession, your skill with the children – you even knew the damn dance, for God’s sake.” He shook his head. “You were so perfect, you were exactly what I needed so desperately, you were Mary Poppins in a form-fitting dress, and I never questioned you for a moment. Very clever.”

“I understand that this is upsetting to you.”

“Upsetting doesn’t begin to describe it,” he said. “Tell me the truth. Were you sent purposefully to infiltrate my home?”

“Yes,” Susan said. She saw the next question in his eyes, and shook her head. “The former governess’ departure was a happy accident of timing. You have Louisa to thank for that, I’m afraid.”

The muscle jumped in his jaw. Any semblance of his relaxed, unbuttoned, flirtatious self was gone; she hadn’t heard his tone this clipped and military since the day of the boat accident. “Who sent you? British Intelligence?”

_If you only knew,_ Susan thought. “I’m afraid I can’t give you the particulars of my employment,” she said. “My presence in your household is, however, meant to be protective and … benign. It’s important that you believe me when I say that.”

He digested this. “Benign,” he repeated, and huffed out a brusque little laugh. “You are many things, Fräulein, but I would not in a hundred years use that word to describe you.” He raked one hand through his hair. “I suppose I understand why the Nazis want me,” he said after a moment. The anger was gone from his voice; now he just sounded weary. “Public relations, yes?”

“That’s one way to put it.”

“But why would the Allies take an interest? I’m not well placed in the government – all my contact is unofficial – and I’m retired from the military. I’m not familiar with the new technology, and my expertise is twenty years out of date. What do they care if I am conscripted to sink ships for Adolf Hitler or not?”

“My sources believe you to be pivotal,” Susan said. “A tipping point, if you will.”

He turned to face her. She could feel him staring at her profile. “I am pivotal, am I?” he said quietly. “So important that one young woman has been dispatched from God knows where or whom, to ensure my safety.” He swallowed. “But then, you are far more than you appear to be, are you not?”

“I am,” Susan said, and felt the air between them thicken. 

To disperse the tension, she rose from the bench and moved a few steps away from him, toward the summerhouse. The walls were still warm with the remembrance of sunlight. She leaned against the nearest one, bracing herself with both hands and feeling the smooth glass turn sticky and humid against her palms.

“Is it all deception, then?” he asked from the bench, after a long pause. “The teaching? The way you are with – with the children?”

“Of course not,” Susan said, affronted. “Teaching is my passion, my true career. The relationships I develop with my students are all genuine.” She shook her head. “I was happy to come back after these days away, and see the children again.” 

His head came up. “You missed the children.”

“Yes.”

Speculative silence. “Only the children?”

“I don’t know what you want me to say to that.”

A spark of challenge flared in his eyes. Susan watched him flow, panther-like, off the bench and toward her, and didn’t move. He stopped a scant two inches away from her, so close that she could feel his breath on her cheek. “Liar.”

Her throat was dry. She swallowed. “You’re angry with me,” she said carefully, “and I understand why.”

“Oh?”

“I’ve just blown up your expectations.”

That took him a second to process; he hadn’t been expecting it. “And those were?” he demanded.

“You love your children,” she said to his pulsating jawline. “You’ve just ended your relationship with a woman you desired physically, because she would be a terrible stepmother.”

“How do you know about that?”

Susan ignored the question. “You’ve set me up as a foil to her,” she continued, “because the children like me and I’m good with them. You’ve been building a fantasy in your head that I’m Jane Eyre and you’re Rochester and that you need only to put me in a ring and a white dress to make your family complete again.”

His hands smacked the glass on either side of her head and stayed there. “Don’t flatter yourself, Fräulein.”

“I understand that you need to say that to save your pride,” Susan said, wetting her dry lips. “That’s fine. What I need you to hear is that your family is already complete. There’s no missing piece there.”

He caged her in for another instant, then swore and twisted away from her. “I know that, goddamn it.” 

Susan drew a careful breath and let it out again slowly. Her body felt like a struck tuning fork, vibrating a shivering inaudible pitch into the night air. “Do you?”

He shook his head, swiping his arm over his eyes. “Perhaps I do,” he said, the words muffled against his sleeve. “And perhaps … perhaps I don’t.” He spun back toward her. “Would it be so terrible for you?” he demanded. “To be part of us?”

The vulnerability in the question made her throat constrict. “Not terrible,” she said. “Just not – possible.”

He processed this with a furrowed brow and a half-nod, bracing himself against the open door of the summerhouse. His dark eyes were perceptive in the low light. “Your cheek is glowing,” he said after a long beat of silence. “So bright. It’s like a flame through pink silk.”

“Yes.”

“You trembled in my arms,” he said, “when we danced. Just for a moment, but I felt it.”

“Yes.”

He came forward a step, then another. “There’s a look in your eyes,” he said, his face tense and determined. “It was there the first day, and it’s still there. I think I have it too. You’re so contained within yourself, but everything inside that box is lonely.”

“You’re not wrong,” Susan said, dry-mouthed. He was close to her again, and the air was thick and pulsing. She could feel her heart adjust to its rhythm, feel the pores of her skin flare with expectation. _You might like to think you’re immune to this,_ she told herself, _but that would be a lie._

“Being who and what I am,” she said quietly, “makes loneliness inevitable. That doesn’t mean I can be anything different.”

“I understand,” said the Captain, and took a step closer. 

His hands were back on the wall, this time threading gently and carefully into her hair. Susan inhaled the essence of him and felt her blood clamor in response. The handprint on her cheek – her immortal inheritance – pulsed and throbbed like a beating heart.

It made sense that her humanity-obsessed grandfather would absolutely approve of this. _All right, Granddad,_ she thought, _you win._

“Do you understand?” she said aloud. “Do you really?”

“No ring,” said the Captain, so close that she felt his lips curve. “No white dress. No madwomen in the attic – it is far too full of dioramas and daisy chains at any rate.” He pulled back just far enough to meet her eyes. “Nothing you can’t give me. But every other thing I can possibly think of to ask for.”

Susan laughed at that, and felt her breath mingle with his.

“Well then,” she said, and brought up one hand to cup the back of his neck and adjust the angle of his mouth against hers. “Just so long as we both know what this is.”

**


	15. The Summerhouse, Part II

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

**

It was better, Georg told himself, that she wasn’t really a governess. He had acquaintances who slept with members of their household staff, and while the practice seemed to be at least nominally acceptable in his social circle – people did it and then admitted to it afterward, usually while drunk - he found it a bit distasteful. 

It had been a while for him. He’d endured a certain amount of mockery from Elsa – and later, since she couldn’t keep a secret from him, Max as well – when he admitted just how long he’d been keeping his own company.

“Your _wife,”_ Elsa had said, feigning amused shock. “Dear me, Georg, what a romantic you are. And — this goes without saying — completely thoughtless, as well.”

“Thoughtless?”

“Of course, darling. You’re forcing me to compete with your phantom paragon of all the womanly virtues. When the day arrives, of course; it will take me months to muster my courage, now that I know what I’m up against.” 

She’d run the tip of one manicured finger down his arm from the shoulder to the elbow. “And you appear so … urbane, to the casual glance.” A sly upward look through her lashes. “First impressions can be deceitful, can they not?”

As was frequently the case, her teasing nicked him more deeply than he could bring himself to admit. “Come here, then, you viper,” he’d said, smiling at her and summoning the surface charm he thought of as his Vienna face as he pulled her toward him for a kiss. “Let Round One of the competition commence. I shall keep a mental tally of your points as we go.”

That kiss had been elusive and sweetly perfumed and just a bit licentious. His pride was stung; he was a bit more aggressive than he might have been otherwise; Elsa succumbed prettily, letting her head fall back on her long neck, sweeping the taste of him from her top lip with her pink kitten tongue as she at last drew away. He remembered feeling vindicated afterwards by her shortened breath, her heavy lashes, the way she’d pressed against him for just a minute before ending their embrace. And yes, along with the satisfaction of having silenced her, he’d felt desire rising in him to press toward the surface. 

It was pleasant to push it back down to where it belonged. He had promised it more and future sweets, and with that it had been content to retreat, coiling and settling itself again in the pit of his belly.

This kiss was not like that one. _This_ kiss brought the beast within him to life at once, roaring and plunging at the end of its fraying tether, raking him from inside with its frantic, furious claws. Her mouth was open under his and he felt her teeth graze his lower lip and a sound came out of him that was frustration and amazement and need in equal parts and he took one step into her and flattened her against the glass wall. 

One hand was at her nape, in that swirling, roiling constellation of curls – they gripped his wrist almost like tentacles, cuffing him in satin, holding him as still as he meant to hold her — and the other raked down the side of her body to her lower back, pressing her toward him. She could easily have evaded him at that point, she had only to sidestep, but instead she moaned and softened into his hands and let him slide her just a little higher on the wall: heels lifting, toes pointing out, thighs parting into an inviting, beckoning cradle under their maddening layers of moonlight-colored chiffon.

He tore his mouth from hers with the last of his willpower, pressing his lips to her damp temple. “Say something,” he ordered her, and laughed out loud when instead of speaking she fisted her hands in the collar of his shirt and ripped down, sending his buttons dancing over the worn old bricks of the walkway. 

“We can talk later,” she breathed into his ear, and shoved him backward. They stumbled together into the summerhouse and sank down onto one of the benches that circled its perimeter. The back of his head bumped the palm of her hand; she had caught him, he realized, just before he smacked into the glass. She settled astride his thighs, shifting and adjusting to give her knees purchase on the narrow wooden ledge.

He gripped her waist to steady her. “Why am I not surprised that you won’t follow directions even now?”

“Try hard not to be disappointed,” she said primly. He chuckled, and caught a glimpse of reflected light – she was smiling. He exerted a bit of downward pressure, guiding her hips into a slow circular grind against him. They both gasped.

“This dress,” he said thickly, rooting through the layers of chiffon. “Does it ever end?” The urgency he’d felt earlier was – well, not gone entirely, but transmuted into something slower and sweeter, something exquisitely tortuous. “Tell me the truth, Fräulein – have you legs at all?”

“Of course I do,” she said, just as he fought through the last layer of the petticoat and found the warm humid skin of her thighs, the tantalizing scrape of her lace garters. “I’m human, after all, or at least mostly.”

“Only mostly?” He couldn’t think. Her hands were inside his ruined shirt, tracing the contours of his torso. He cupped her sex, dragging his fingers over the scrap of damp silk that covered it. “You’re sticky halfway down your thighs, you know. You’re hot enough to scald my hand.”

She gritted her teeth. Above the neckline of the dress, her skin was pink and flushed. “Don’t you want to stop touching my clothes, and start touching me?”

He found her through the wet silk and worried her with his thumbnail, pleased when she made a strangled sound in her throat. “Impatient,” he chided her, and flicked her again. An open-mouthed moan this time. Perfection.

“Damn it,” she said in a voice that didn’t sound like hers, and went for his trouser buttons; he heard them pop and scatter and then her hands were on him, small and sure and insistent and he imagined that he would explode from his skin while they glared at each other and he kept up the flickering of his thumb and for one long minute he was afraid it would end that way, in this blissful maddening impasse, and then the flush on her chest built and darkened and her head fell back and almost instinctively he grabbed at her with his free hand to keep her from falling. And just like that he drew the silk aside and she pulled insistently at his cock, her fingers wrapped around it to the very root, and her chiffon skirts covered them both and beneath them he went into her just as she shuddered and bucked against his hands and said something under her breath in a language he wasn’t sure he understood.

And then he had her, well and truly, or at least as much as any man could have her, this woman who was so much her own. He put his hands on her ankles and slid them up her legs, past her hipbones to the downy naked softness just above them and down again, and dug his fingers into the fullest curve of her backside, delicious, yes, and lifted her and brought her down on him and swiveled his hips up into her tight slippery perfection – again, again — and felt himself held and examined there like a lone explorer in a foreign land, one shooting star into the vast night of the universe. I am going to lose part of myself now, he thought, shaking, panting, poised to explode, and it will not come back to me.

She wrapped him in filmy blue chiffon and gripped him in elastic velvet and he held back for every instant that he could – to make it last, or to keep himself whole, who knew – and then she said “What are you waiting for?” very softly, into the quivering depths of his left ear, and he lost himself. 

Meteor showers in his head. The last of Elsa’s honeyed poison, expelled from his pores.

**

When he opened his eyes, she was putting the last pin back into her hair. “Don’t,” he said pettishly, stealing the pin before she could drive it home. “I like it loose like that.”

“It has a mind of its own,” she said severely, but he could tell she was hiding a smile behind her glower as he dragged it down again.

“Better,” he said, closing his eyes again and letting his head fall back against the wall of the summerhouse. “Not perfect, though.”

“No?”

“Perfect would be you naked in my bed,” he said sleepily, “without the long walk up the hill and past the servants’ quarters.” He snaked a hand under her skirt — she had not yet managed to unstraddle his thighs — and curled two fingers into her. They went in easily; she was still wet. “There,” he said, “to hold you still. And _this,_ with the thumb, to make you come back for another night. Not to mention that I have yet to put my mouth on your lovely breasts; do I get a gold star for not ruining your gown?”

“You know about the gold stars, do you?” She arched her back, moving restlessly against his hand as he continued to caress her. “Then you know they’re very hard to earn. I won’t say I’m not tempted, though.”

“I feel it would be a mistake to settle for silver.”

“Is that right?” She looked at him for a long moment. The moonlight threw her face mostly into shadow, but Georg could tell by the thick quality of the silence that she was making up her mind about something. “It’s true,” she said finally, “that explaining the change in our, ah, circumstances to the servants might prove difficult.”

“Undoubtedly.”

“Your buttons have fled from you. And it is rather a steep walk up the hill.”

He didn’t know where she was going with this, but he nodded anyway. “Right as usual,” he said, still stroking, and felt the tiny internal flutter of her orgasm seize his fingers. She let out a barely audible sigh.

“This might ruin everything,” she said, folding forward to press against him. He felt her arms wrap around his waist. “But it’s been a long day. So hold on to me, and close your eyes.”

**


End file.
